This revival of the Bruce Foundry’s No. 11 is typical of the nineteenth century types derived from the work of Didot and Bodoni; the face remains popular with lawyers and government printers. In fact, Theodore Low De Vinne opposed this kind of design as hard to print and read; he had Century designed to replace it.

A 1940s Australian song folio featuring tunes performed by singer-actress Deanna Durbin had her name hand lettered in an interesting Art Deco style sans. This became the basis for Song Folio JNL, capturing all the nuances of the original in digital form.

AlphaBravo was born on a napkin. I was just doodling, playing around with letterforms when the ballpoint glided a little bit too far and suddenly I had my first letter with the dash sticking out on the left of the e’s horizontal line. I quickly checked on how many letters I could let a line stick out! Then I wrote a couple of words that way and letters joined in the most unusual places, creating new closed forms. I gave the font a try and quickly discovered, that I had stumbled onto an interesting new typeface. I didn't know how to call it, so I simply used the first two letters of the alphabet, Alpha and Bravo. Looking forward to Charlie and Delta, your very curious, Gert Wiescher.

The name of this font brings back memories of an old fried chicken restaurant in Willow Springs Illinois circa 1960’s and 1970’s, my family would all get in the car and take a long drive down to an old country road Illionis Rt 171 through a forest preserve where we’d come upon the old Willowbrook motel with a bar and restaurant next door. The restaurant was called Kegal’s, when you entered the building you had to walk through the smoky bar first to get to the restaurant, I can still see the hard wood floors with all the finish worn off from decades of foot traffic. Up until the mid 1960’s Kegal’s used to raise their own chickens behind the restaurant, back then fried chicken in the Midwest was either coated in flour or bread crumbs, Kegal’s was covered in a beautiful layer of golden bread crumbs. Before your meal arrived they’d bring a basket of dinner rolls along with crackers, bread sticks and country butter, on the side they’d serve coleslaw with a vinegar sauce, which is very common in the Midwest, the first time you try it your face puckers up like you just sucked on a lemon but you get used it over time. After waiting for what seemed like forever to a child the waitress comes out of the kitchen with a huge tray of that golden deliciousness and your mouth begins to water, in her other hand was another tray filled to overflowing with crinkle cut french fries all made by hand, I’d eat a hole handful of those french fries first then take a bite of that tender juicy farm raised chicken. Today a fine Italian restaurant occupies the old Kegal’s building and the motel is long gone, only my fond memories remain. Fast forward to 2020 and FontMesa has just made some Fried Chicken as an eight weight type font family with alternates. With the Fried Chicken slab serif font family we’ve broken some rules by removing a few of the slabs on certain letters for a unique homemade look. Fried Chicken is perfect for your next product label, t-shirt design, logo, headline or cookbook cover. Treat yourself to some good ol’ Fried Chicken today.

Basati is a display typeface designed for headlines and hard-hitting messages. It is sharp, heavy, and hard as an axe. But don’t be fooled by its rough look or the impression of having been carved with a machete. Each character is precise and sharp as a scalpel, and in that perfectly cut informality lies her deliberately wild temperament. Perhaps because its design was conceived during a severe bout of lumbago, its strokes are heavy and provocative, as if trying to defy logic and gravity alike.

A Trollkatt in Norwegian myth, is the cat associated with witches. The last few days a stray ginger cat seems to have adopted us - she comes into the house, lies down on the carpet and loves the cat food we bought her. We have posted some ‘found a cat’ messages online and hung op some flyers - just in case someone is missing a cat. Because of the stray, I decided that I should name this font something cattish, so Trollkatt is what popped up. The font is quite nice; I made it with my Chinese ink and a brush, from which I cut most of the hairs. This font won’t catch mice, but it will put some magic into your designs! And the stray cat… well, if she isn’t chipped and no one comes to fetch her, we will keep her. #happyending

“The Auto Show” is the title of an early 1900s pieces of sheet music proving that America has had a fascination with cars since the earliest days of the automotive industry. The song sheet’s title was hand lettered in a casual Art Nouveau style which has been re-drawn digitally as Nouveau Auto JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions… and what’s better than a nouveau auto (a new car)?

This typeface is a carefully crafted display-typeface of fairy-tale breadcrumbs and fleeting love messages in the sand: Dusty or sparkly, legible or hard to decipher … but always a little bit magical. DEUTSCH: Hänsel und Grete hätte ihre Freude an diesem magischen Brotkrumen-Font. Ob taubig, sandig oder funkelnd. Dieser mit viel Liebe kreierte Font hat viele Anwendungen…

Girlstory is a font that inspired the story of a woman who tries hard for her children, never giving up in order to achieve and keep happiness together. This font has simple and interesting style characters for various design needs at this time, you can use it for embroidery, screen printing, business cards, cutting, branding, etc.

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.

Narrow, playful, jaggedy letters inspired by a typewriter.

The other day I was at a market with my kids and they had this really retro kind of circus thing. The signs and posters there, were designed in a really sloppy and poor manner - but they all had a lot of naive charm! I was really fascinated by all these uneven letters and I was immediately inspired to do a font like that! And out of the magic hat comes...ta-da-da-da...Cirkus Fantastiko! Planning on throwing a party with a circus theme? Then Cirkus Fantastiko is ready to play the juggling clown while riding the elephant! Play around with the 3 different layers to create that low budget hand painted cirkus posters! :)

Ever since I first designed Ellida in 2005, that elaborate script in the tradition of the 18th-century English calligrapher George Bickham and the 19th-century American calligrapher Platt Rogers Spencer, I wanted to add a very high contrast cut to the family. I finally did so. But the result looks so much different to Ellida that I had to give it another name, hence "Eloise". Eloise should actually be written with a 'i' that has double dots, but that would be difficult for international use. Eloise is a beautiful first name not only for French girls. Pronounce: Ay-low-eese. If I would have had a daughter, I would have called her "Eloise" (with double dots!). But instead I have two phantastic sons, so I never got the chance to use it. Actually one of my sons discovered it on his little boys sand shovel, it was called Eloise. Your decorative designer with a heart for sand shovels Gert Wiescher

Endgame font was made using a very, VERY bad brush and Chinese ink. I had bought a bunch of brushes some time ago and I discovered that the hairs had been treated with some goo to keep them from sticking out. The goo didn’t really come off, so when I started to draw the glyphs for this font, the brush strokes were kind of wild. In the end, I really liked it (even though I will never again buy that particular brand of brushes). Endgame is a wild brush font. Comes with the works: diacritics, ligatures and alternates.

A 1929 German travel poster had the caption “Wer schlafwagen reist spart zdeit und geld” (“Whoever travels in a sleeping car saves time and money”) hand lettered in an Art Deco sans serif style. This is now available as Foreign Tourist JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

Funny Nature is not a typeface but a collection of small, comic-like symbols. Lüdicke used to work often for a supplier of gardening equipment etc. He had to come up with new, original and vivid ideas for the design of catalogues and ads. He designed Funny Nature, a wonderful collection of illustrations. Can you hear the humming and buzzuing, can you smell the flowers?

Chronically strong, yet pacific. Chronically bold, yet friendly. This font was at first inspired by a HAP Grieshaber work and soon incorporated elements from pieces by Willem Sandberg, two astonishing artists who lived through two world wars. They had to struggle for freedom and consistently manifested, with words, works and actions, their absolute love of liberty. Both were chronically free. As this font intends to be.

Kanna Aoki had fairy tales in mind when she designed MVB Greymantle. She drew dots with a felt pen to build up the forms, giving them their particular rough character. The “Extras” font contains a set of whimsical illustrations, including a portrait of Greymantle—her 18-pound cat, a set of curly initial caps, and border parts.  MVB Greymantle has been spotted on numerous children's books, in magazines, in salad dressing advertisements, and on food packaging.

Once I had a young, very eager and interested designer in my employ. We got into talking about where our letterforms come from and the habits in perception we are used to. He did not quite believe me. So I said, let's try to design a typeface where everything is just the opposite of what we are used to. We really had a hard time, our habits crept up on us all the time. But after a couple of weeks we finally finished this typeface and wanted to call it crazytype, but my young apprentice ­ who did most of the manual labor ­ said Contype sounded crazier. So it became Contype and it's really crazy, with a small asian touch to it. Yours very crazy Gert Wiescher

The 1930s era French textbook on lettering "100 Alphabets Publicitaires déssinés par M. Moullet" featured a hand lettered chamfered alphabet with slab serifs reminiscent of sports lettering. Although intended for advertising and signage inspiration, only a partial lower case was illustrated along with the capitals and no numbers or other characters existed. These had to be created from scratch. The finished result is not only a bit of classic lettering from the past, but the font also doubles as a typeface with a sports look and feel. A traditional (rather than stylized) M and N are located on the solid bar key and the broken bar key respectively. Old Sport JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

LisaBeth Weber's eponymous typeface ITC Weber Hand is deceptively simple-looking. It's a handwriting face in a light, monolineal style with a slightly formal, almost angular appearance. Weber, who is an accomplished singer/songwriter as well as an artist and lettering artist, says she has always had an inherent sensibility with lettering." Her favorite subject in the first grade was penmanship, and when, as an adult, she got her first checkbook, "I thought it was very unfair that the signature always had to be consistently the same." She describes Weber Hand as "a natural progression of my handwriting style, a friendly and versatile font." Its letterfit is naturally loose, and it shows its character best when set with ample leading. In 1999, when LisaBeth Weber's ITC Weber Hand™ typeface was released, it soon became one of ITC's most popular handwriting fonts. A decade later she decided that is was time to update her single-weight design. A light weight would benefit from a bold companion, in addition to condensed variations for much greater versatility. This warm, friendly, and charming design is just as at home in Restaurant menus as it is in brochures, for advertising, and on packaging. With the new weights ITC Weber Hand will surely continue to be a popular handwriting type with broad appeal."

Ishtar was the Babylonian goddess of war, fertility, love and sex - all in all a lethal combination. She wasn't the sweetheart her lovers had hoped for; I guess the 'war' part in her resume is a dead give-away. Ishtar font is no sweetheart either: it doesn't have a real baseline and its spooky character might not be everyone's cup of tea. It does have a certain charm, however, and befitting a Babylonian goddess, it comes with Babylonian language support!

We know very little about this font. A printer in Lisbon had it, but said it came from England. Nicolette Gray shows it in her Nineteenth Century Ornamented Type Faces as Lord Mayor from the British Typefoundry. We never got the complete font, but drawing the missing letters was not difficult.

This set of four fonts, organized as a font family, consists of toy train cars with letters on them. Upper and lower cases have different typefaces on them, so there are eight different type styles available. Some of the letters on the cars are from Salloon, TiredOfCourier, Glitzy, Qwatick, and PhederFrack. To add variety using more cars without letters, use the XLaserTrain font.

Morris Fuller Benton's Hobo [designed in 1910] is one of a number of fonts which have been so over-used that many designers shy away from it altogether. However, Jeff Levine had often wondered what the design might look like it given a serif treatment. The result is Rail Bum JNL, named for the hobos and transients who hitched along on freight cars to ride the rails across the country during the years when trains were the mainstay of American transportation.

With Linotype Albatross, Hans-Jürgen Ellenberger has played with flames that come out of the exhausts from Michael Schumacher's Ferrari, or the hot rod cars in America, or at tractor pulling contests. This gives this sans serif face a speedy and wavy flavour. It fits ideally for speedy headlines like for bikers couriers.

In a specimen book from Stevens, Shanks & Sons, Ltd. of London (circa1930s) “Royal Gothic” was their version of a classic grotesk sans that had been in use as far back as 1899 when the Keystone Foundry called it “Charter Oak”. The terms "gothic" and "grotesk" were equally applied to early sans serif typefaces – at first not well embraced by printers as being too ugly (grotesque) for use. One familiar characteristic of early grotesk fonts (such as this one) is the numerous variations of character widths and shapes. By combining those two terms into a font name, the digital version of this design is called Gothic Grotesk JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The 1930 Geneva Motor Show (Salon International De l'Automobile Et Du Cycle) showcased a lot of new cars, but one item in particular took my interest: the amazing art deco poster announcing the show. Lokomotiv font was based on this poster. It is a very deco-ish font, futuristic, angular, with bold squares, rounds and triangles. As I had to work with just a handful of glyphs, and needed to fill an entire font, I made up the missing ones myself. Lokomotiv, by the way, is German for Locomotive.

The cover of the 1904 sheet music from the Tibetan comic opera “The Forbidden Land” had the title hand lettered in an unusual Art Nouveau style. Mostly squared with rounded corners, many of the characters twisted, turned and extended in ways that took on the look of the Far East. This became the design model for Nouveau Moderne JNL, which is available in regular and oblique versions.

This digitally remastered high density lettering has been bitmapped out for you by Comicraft's Eric Eng Wong. Those of you harddriving through cyberspace on the information superhighway had better zap your prams and reboot your hard disk before you're dragged into your system folder while OVERBYTE makes a major withdrawal from your atm. Do not be fooled by the name, there's nothing goofy about this typeface.

Everyone likes getting a handwritten letter. At least, they would if anyone still hand wrote letters. We heard a story about a type designer who gets a Christmas card from his niece. He’s been out of touch with her for years and is both delighted and surprised to receive a handwritten note. His first thought is “How sweet; how very nice to hear from her.” His second thought is,”Great font potential; I could use this.” And he did. Carissa has a fresh, spontaneous feel, with a wonderful use of uppercase letters (B and R, etc.) within the lower case. Useful as a personal font or for an off-beat menu...

Birka is the first typeface I designed from scratch. It took a whole year of my weekend and evening hours and is the typeface that teached me everything I know about type design. It is easy too see that I had Garamond in mind when drawing it. Birka is beautiful" was the comment of the well known Swedish designer Bo Berndal when he first saw it. That comment gave me the courage to design more and more typefaces. In a Danish article about Scandinavian type design, Birka was taken as example of a typical Swedishness in typography. I am not sure what the writer had in mind, but it surely sounded well. Birka has its name from the ancient Viking town Birka, whose remains are found not far away from Stockholm. Birka was released in 1992."

This is a cute story about a mother and her son. :) About a decade ago my own mother got very interested in my work. She used to say my letters had so many swirls and dazzling swashes, and suggested my job seemed to be very fun. She wondered if she could ever try to make her own alphabet... Well, she is a civil engineer and a maths teacher, and appeared to be a little tired of exact sciences... I remember answering this, while she was listening with her typical tender look: -"Mamá... While type-design may be a really enjoyable thing to do, it also involves having a great eye and knowledge about the history of letters: nice curves and shapes require a meticulous study and, like it happens in many fields, practice makes perfect"-. Well, she raised her eyebrows at me. -"and so what?"- She didn't have any experience neither in the field of art nor in the field of graphic design so, I told her that if she really wanted to get into this she should borrow some of my calligraphic books from my beloved shelves in my office. So... she did. Some weeks after that, she came to me with many sketches made with pencils and markers: some letters where very nice and unique while others naturally needed some work. I remember she added ball terminals to all of her letters (even if they didn't need them) because that was one of the rules she imposed. After some back and forth, we had the basis for what would be today, ten years later, the seed of this lovely font Girasol. Her proposal was nice, something I was not accustomed to do, that’s why many years later I decided to watch it with fresh new eyes and finished it. While she was in charge of making the lowercase letters, I helped with the uppercase and also added my hallmark in the alternates, already seen in others of my expressive fonts. The result is an upright decorative font that follows the behavior of the copperplate nib with a naive touch that makes it really cute and useful for a wide range of products. Many alternates per glyph make Girasol a very fun to use font which will delight you. Above posters are a proof of that! This font is a gift for my mother, Susana, who, in spite of her exacts academic background, taught me that beauty can also be found in the imperfect. 1 NOTES (1) In my fonts I'm always in seek of the perfect curve. When I designed Erotica and Dream Script, I read about Fibonacci’s spirals!

Linotype Colibri is a delightfully playful display face, from the award-winning German typeface designer Hans-Jürgen Ellenberger. Linotype Colibri's letters dance up and down across the baseline, and appear as if they had been drawn quickly and whimsically with a felt tip pen. The design is available in two weights: Light and Regular.

A little cartoony, a little retro, a little coquettish, Miss Kitty Delux is ready for fun. Used in a non-OpenType aware application, she's a lively little typeface. Use her in an OpenType aware application and she really shines: Contextual Alternates automatically dress her up the way she was meant to be. Gussy her up even more with swashes, ornaments, and more ligatures than you can shake a stick at. Use Stylistic Sets to dress her down or dress her up even more. Take her out to play!

Rackem PB started as a digitization of a film typeface known as "Eightball" by LetterGraphics, not to be confused with Eightball that was released by other film type companies of a totally different look. This crazy typestyle had all the flavor it needed to make regular appearances in 70's sticker body modification ads for Chevrolet cars and trucks side panels. Loaded with hooptie appeal, it's something you really need to take for a ride to appreciate its novelty.

The English typographer Robert Harling created Tea Chest in 1939 with the Stephenson Blake foundry. Today, this classic design is available in digital format from Linotype GmbH. Tea Chest is a bold stencil face. The font's narrow letters are all caps, and they sport small, slab serifs. Harling's design was most likely reminiscent of the old industrial lettering painted onto boxes and wooden crates that used to be shipped all over the world on the high seas. These letters had to be simple to reproduce, easy to read, and not take up too much space! Try out Tea Chest for large signage displays, on exotic product packaging, or in magazine or newsletter headlines.