IngrimayneType has put letters inside a variety of objects, including bowling pins, book covers, coffee mugs, teapots, pumpkins, Christmas ornaments, train cars, tombstones, old bottles, circles, and rectangles. In each case the letters were placed on a single shape. The use of the Opentype feature of contextual alternatives makes it easy to use two different but alternating shapes. ButterflyWingz puts its letters on the right and left wings of a butterfly. The wings provide a large surface for drawing letters, but they have a odd shape so letters must be distorted to fit. The wings are symmetrical but some letters are not, so the right and left wing versions of the same letter are sometimes quite different. Without the contextual alternative feature one could design a typeface like ButterflyWingz but the user would have to alternate upper and lower case keys. With contextual alternatives turned on, the computer automatically alternates the letters creating a line of complete butterflies. Turning on the Opentype feature stylistic styles one (ss01) replaces the empty spaces with empty wings. However, sometimes an empty wing at the end of a line is unwanted and it can be removed by changing the typeface or by turning off the stylistic style for that character. The family contains two styles, a filled style and an outline style. They can be used separately or together in layers to add color. (Empty wings are on the logicalnot and registered characters.) ButterflyWingz is hard to read and should be used in small doses for decorative effects.

ITC Motter Sparta is the work of Austrian designer Othmar Motter and for its inspiration, he turned to car design. As we all know, trends in car design affect many other fields of design in a way that shapes tastes." At the end of the 1990s, Motter saw the trend moving away from soft lines and toward a tighter, tenser look: "In this latest trend, sharp clearly-defined edges meet broadly-drawn, dynamic curves and cut them off sharply." And so too is ITC Motter Sparta, with each character form distinct, which also creates a typeface instantly recognizable from a single character. "The sharp straight strokes, cut off almost at right angles, and the strong cross-stroke curves, ending in points, form a charged contrast to the vertical and horizontal straight strokes that give Motter sparta its taut framework.""

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

I became interested in designing Bodoni Classic because of a lazy graphic designer at Jacques Damase publishing house. He had to change a single letter on a bookcover about J. B. BODONI. The French call him Jean Baptiste instead of Giambattista! And that unknown graphic designer just took any old “J” from some newly cut Bodoni. All the new Bodoni cuts have square serifs, whereas the originals had rounded serifs and slightly concave feet. The single letter “J” with the squared off serif was for me like a road sign to start redesigning the entire Bodoni family. That’s exactly what I started in 1993 and a dozen years later I am finished. Okay, I am still adding new Bodoni Classics, but those are my personal additions. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

Sunnyside is groovy retro concept typographic come with duo combined, regular and extrude, bring if the old west and the 70s had a lovechild with not a unformal usage, it's the perfect typeface for adding sophisticated playfulness to any design project. fit to logo, brand, apparel, etc

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.

Haarlemmer is a recreation of a never-produced Jan Van Krimpen typeface that goes one step beyond authentic: it shows how he wanted it to be designed in the first place. The original, drawn in the late 1930s, was created for the Dutch Society for the Art of Printing and Books and was to be used to set a new edition of the Bible, using Monotype typesetting. Hence the problem: fonts for metal typesetting machines like the Linotype and Monotype had to be created within a crude system of predetermined character width values. Every letter had to fit within and have its spacing determined by a grid of only 18 units. Often, the italic characters had to share the same widths as those in the roman design. Van Krimpen believed this severely impaired the design process. The invasion of Holland in World War II halted all work on the Bible project, and the original Haarlemmer never went into production. Flash forward about sixty years. Frank E. Blokland, of The Dutch Type Library, wanted to revive the original Haarlemmer, but this time as Van Krimpen would have intended. Blokland reinterpreted the original drawings and created a typeface that matched, as much as possible, Van Krimpen's initial concept. While Van Krimpen's hand could no longer be on the tiller, a thorough study of his work made up for his absence. The result is an exceptional text family of three weights, with complementary italic designs and a full suite of small caps and old style figures. Van Krimpen would be proud.

Acton is a deceptively simple, grid-based design. Though derived from a 2 by 3 arrangement of blocks, it uses white spaces to allow for more complex shapes – for example as the R – where the underlying 3 by 5 arrangement is apparent. It also departs from this strict grid-based logic for characters such as the the T, L, f and r, whose cross-bars are shorter than they would otherwise be in order to promote optical evenness. No elegant solution could be found for the V, which in geometric fonts can appear very similar to the U, lacking as it does the cross-bar that can differentiate a square A from the capital form of the n. However, the resultant diagonal retroactively proved useful on the lower-case e and a, characters that otherwise would have more uninteresting design solutions.

Dionisio, a CastleType original, takes its inspiration from one of the overlooked treasures of the CastleType library: Ransahoff. The latter is extremely condensed and very elegant. I particularly like its hairline slab serifs and cross-bars. I decided to use it as a starting point for a new design, but to make the proportions more classic and to make it more sensuous with gentler curves and bracketed cross-bar serifs. The result is very Bodoni-like, but less extreme and more contemporary looking. Meanwhile, Dionisio maintains a hint of Ransahoff with condensed letterforms and very fine serifs. Dionisio brings together the best of both, making it the perfect choice where a slender, sophisticated typeface is needed. Dionisio is available in two widths: normal and condensed, five fonts each. Includes an extensive character set and OpenType features.

German designer Rosemarie Kloos-Rau created Wiesbaden Swing in 1992 for Linotype. This light, informal typeface is based on her own handwriting, and the strokes have a feeling of spontaneity and energetic flair. Characters like the D, O, W, g, n and y really do swing with unbridled confidence and joy. Kloos-Rau says about her typeface: “From the experience with my design company I recognized the need for fonts with personality. Wiesbaden Swing is my contemporary contribution to the field of calligraphy, a headline font which offers a fresh and unconventional approach to typography.” This family has both regular and bold weights, and a set of Dingbats. The Dingbats are light-hearted and zippy symbols for holidays, children’s products, menus, and more. Wiesbaden Swing will add zest to packaging, catalogs, menus, websites, greeting cards, and magazine layouts.

Put on your top hat, tie up your white tie, brush off your tails and surrender your serifs at the door! We've popped open a bottle of French Champagne for you, but don't worry, because our latest stylishly handsome, devilishly clever offering doesn't just offer thrills and chills, it’s also Spillproof! So step out and breathe an atmosphere that simply reeks with class and distinction, What a swell font for party invitations, soirees, nightclubs and weddings this is! See the families related to SpillProof: Spills.

First of all, I don’t have an uncle called Edward, nor do I know anyone by that name. When I had finished this font, it had a strong ‘Uncle Edward’ feeling to it, so the name stuck. Uncle Edward is a handmade script font. I used a Japanese brush pen and some rough paper to create that ‘vintage’ look. Use Uncle Edward for your book covers, your invitations or your product packaging. Create labels for your vintage record collection with it, or print a guest list for your Christmas dinner party. Uncle Edward gives you his blessing. Comes with ligatures for double letters and a whole bunch of accents.

C.H. Griffith was commissioned by the American telephone company, Bell, to design a typeface which would be particularly suited to small, compressed sentences and inferior paper quality. The font was intended for use in the company’s telephone books. Griffith had already had experience with the conception of newsprint fonts and was interested in legibility issues. In 1922 Griffith created the Legibility Group, which contained particularly legible fonts predestined for newspapers. Bell Gothic has all the typical characteristics which optimize a font’s legibility. The modern heir of Bell Gothic is Bell Centennial, designed by Matthew Carter in 1974 in celebration of the Bell Company’s 100th birthday.

I came across an old book called ‘Studio Handbook Letter And Design For Artists And Advertisers’ by Samuel Welo. Samuel Welo was an American advertising calligrapher, typographer and lettering artist, who was most active during the roaring twenties. Lenox Avenue is my version of a set of letters in that book. It was handmade (just like Welo had done). I only had an ABC/abc to work with, so I designed all the remaining glyphs myself. I changed some of the original (and quite quirky) letters to a more contemporary form. The font is named Lenox Avenue, once home of the famous Savoy Ballroom. Comes with all the bells & whistles.

Wood Bonnet Antique No.7 is based on real vintage wood type blocks from Switzerland. The very distressed letters give a warm analogue vintage charm on printing. These kind of wood type letters were very common and often named by generic names like Roman, French or Antique followed by a catalog number. But these letters have some very quirky details hard to find else were. » pdf specimen « The font offers up to five glyph variations of all the Latin base letters, figures and some additional letters. An OpenType glyph-rotator is programmed to emulate the randomness of old school printing on live typing. All dingbats of the specimen file are included in the font data too.

Some scribbles on a bar napkin, a note from a cute girl passed in history class, what is there to say but why not a typeface? Actually it's that late night, �let's get this typeface done� madness that causes these flights of fancy. Anything to relieve the boredom of doing all those kerning pairs. Or maybe it's sunspots? Ms Kitty is all uppercase letterforms so there are two versions of each letter, one in the cap position, another in the lowercase position. Besides the regular weight and bold, there�s a bolder and much bolder in the works. And perhaps there will be a "too bold to be believed" version. Depends on the sunspots.

Trigomy is a proportional pixel font designed on a 5 pixel grid. It is intended for either very small text or as huge display font for posters and the like. To get a crisp look this font should be used at 10 pt or multiples of 10 pt. (A tip for Adobe Creative Suite applications is to change the standard anti-aliasing method from “sharp” to “crisp” and to align the text to whole pixels. Also avoid centered text.) To get started with type design I thought it was best to start with a pixel font because you don't have to focus much on the design itself, but rather have to focus on how kerning and spacing works and the various features you can implement with OpenType. And of course I wanted to have a pixel font that had all that I was missing from other pixel fonts. We were learning trigonometry at the time I started designing Trigomy, and most of the time I misspoke it “trigometry”. So, when I had to come up with a name for my first font I thought: "Why not go with Trigomy?"

This Contemporary style reflects a modern hand-lettered feel. Modeled from a camel hair brush, it is a very legible flowing script.

Gizela shows her personality with a feminine, sensual, seductive and art deco vibes. Perfect for late December invitations and New Year's cards.

Inspired by the beautiful typefaces like Helvetica and Neue Haas Unica, this beautiful typeface looks fantastic in print as well as online.

In 1929 Chauncey Griffith at Mergenthaler commissioned W.A. Dwiggins to design a warmer and less mechanical Geometric Sanserif to compete with Futura. Dwiggins’ best efforts proved that human warmth had little to do with cool geometry; for twelve years, until the introduction of Spartan, Mergenthaler lost ground to Intertype’s licensed version of Futura.

Gothic fraktur inspired design, I wanted to resemble old german calligraphy but making it very geometric, so I used an isometric reticle during sketching. This is a display font, created for BIG sizes, non textual. I recommend it for branding, poster, logos or titles. Its very experimental -- it exists within the limits of legible and illegible reading. I choose the name “Garbancera” because gothic calligraphy has issues that are linked with dark, gloomy, lugubrious things or fear feelings, culturally in Mexico. I related this with death and for mexicans, death is something we celebrate and give us joy and happiness, annoying, the most representative Mexican characters, one of those is “La Calavera Garbancera” or better known as “La Catrina”, a clothes skeleton with only a hat. It was drawn this way to make a critic to all Mexicans at that time, that were poor but they wanted to represent a high lifestyle, “those that where to the bones, but with a French hat with ostrich feathers”. La Catrina was created by José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican lithographer but also a newspaper illustrator. I think this is a beautiful font that can lead to great results, just use it wisely.

Way back before digital imaging, video tape and computer editing, the home movie enthusiast had to shoot on film his own titles using any one of a variety of movie titling kits on the market. One common approach was to arrange white ceramic letters on a colored background and film them. A set of such letters provided the inspiration for Entitled JNL from Jeff Levine. The classic, sleek Art Deco lines of this font makes it an all-purpose design for any headline needs.

I came across an article in which the author warned about the growing pile of technojunk. It appears we throw away 50 million tonnes of unwanted gadgets EVERY YEAR - and, yes, that number is growing as these are the figures for 2012. 50 million tonnes - just think of that! The new font I was working on had a squarish look - almost computer like, so I decided to call it technojunk. Hopefully you won't throw it away… Technojunk is a 3D font, every glyph was drawn by hand. It is fat, fun and very useful. Try it out!

The 1940s-era hand-lettered title on vintage sheet music for the song hit "Donkey Serenade" had an interpretation of the classic typeface "Broadway" used in a Mexican/Southwest motif with wavy lines cutting through the letters. Adapting Playwright JNL (itself, a hand-lettered interpretation of "Broadway") to this style, the festive design is now a digital typeface called Southwest Serenade JNL.

Rebellious Brush marker font is a hand lettered brush script. What fun I've had from the beginning using pencil on paper to practising creating the glyphs with several types of markers! You'll notice that there are a couple of swashes in the preview pictures - I haven't advertised these because they are only accessible via a glyphs panel using the OTF file supplied.

Cowboy Rhumbahut is an old-timey script the drips with a twang and tradition that you can practically hear. If you've been wandering the range, searching for the perfect cowboy alphabet for you, you might wanna wrangle up this old-time original. My goodness that's one kooky cowboy font. Now get to work and start makin' something with it, ya lily-livered varmint!

Based in part on the hand-lettered title for a piece of vintage sheet music, Hayride JNL gets both its inspiration and name from Michael Todd's 1948 production "Mexican Hayride". The original design was in outline form, and the letters with straight-lined shapes had slight curves to them. For Hayride JNL, those lines were straightened and the letters made solid in appearance.

Imagine shaping letterforms and messages from dough or chewed gum. This is Chewbrio in essence; No straight lines, no closed shapes and no sharp corners. Chewbrio is a fresh take on stencil. Four sets of all basic characters make for a very large number of combinations, and a hoard of ligatures will further your ability to surprise. Designed by Hans Samuelson in 2023.

Inspired by the streamlined lettering of trains, cars and advertisements from the 1930s and 1940s, Silver Streak is a font family that combines Art Deco elegance with refined craftsmanship and modern features. Silver Streak's contrasting strokes and tastefully rounded corners conjure an era of refined, vintage elegance. An extravagant palette of 25 weights — from gracefully tall and thin to commandingly wide and heavy, along with a variable font for unlimited options between — provide unforgettable branding possibilities for luxury items ranging from jewelry, clothing and perfume to the sleek badges of high performance sports cars. Features: Five widths from Compressed to Extended Each with five weights from Light to Heavy Complete family includes a Variable font for precise control of weight and width Support for 223 languages, including Western & Central Europe, Russian Cyrillic, Serbian/Macedonian, Ukranian and Vietnamese Alternate hook-cornered capitals (accessible as Opentype Discretionary Ligatures) Alternate round-topped A in two versions, each with international accents (accessible as Stylistic Alternates)

The front page of a late-1940s sales catalog for the [now defunct] Duro Decal Company of Chicago had its company name hand-lettered in a tall, condensed chamfered sans serif type design. Although chamfered lettering had been popular for decades, the way the "R" was shaped gave the letters a bit of an Art Deco influence, and this influence was carried through in the creation of Durable JNL.

Andulka was drawn in 2004 for the purposes of publication and visual identity. Her peaceful expression also excels in poetry and fiction. It reads so smoothly that you won’t even know that its width proportion is actually narrowed, so it’s very suitable for magazines, newspapers and thickest volumes of scientific literature. Her serif counterpart is Andulka. The entire Andulka system can easily build a typography of the entire publishing house.

A gentle breeze caressed his face as his body took on the easy posture of a dancer on break. Flickering sparklets of light sprinkled the glass-smooth surface of the aqua liquid on which he floated. His mind wandered; he was only days away from his scheduled departure date. This day was no different from a hundred other days he had spent melded to his windsurfer, skittering along the breadth of the modest lake, soaking up the sun's rays and forgetting about the entire rest of the world. Lake Quannapowitt, and the town of Wakefield, Massachusetts, were familiar to Steve, a long-time resident of the picturesque New England town. This is where he grew up; this is where he married and lived for many years; and this is the place he was preparing to leave, not one week hence. Not generally prone to nostalgia, it was in just such a state he nonetheless found himself once Zephyrus retreated, as was his custom, periodically, while patrolling the resplendent lake. Steve was going to miss the lake, and he was going to miss the town. How many hours of how many days had he spent exactly like this, standing on his motionless board, waiting for his sail to fill, and staring at the lake's shores, its tiny beach, the town Common with its carefully maintained greenery, and equally well-tended gazebo, the Center church - its spire shadow piercing the water's edge, like a scissor-cut the better to begin a full-fabric tear? Yes, he was going to miss this place - this town which all of a sudden had become a place out of time, just as he was about to become a person out of place. Once this idea struck him, he couldn't shake it. He was transported back in time four score years, now watching his ancestors walk along the shore. Nothing in view belied this belief - not the church's century old architecture, not the gazebo frozen in time, nor the timeless sands of the beach, nor the unchanging Common. Everything belonged exactly where it was, and where it always would be. This, he decided, was how he would remember his hometown. And this is when it occurred to Steve to design a typeface that would evoke these images and musings - a typeface with an old-fashioned look, reflected in high crossbars, an x-height small in size relative to its uppercase, and an intangible quality reminiscent of small-town quaintness. Wakefield, the typeface, was born on Lake Quannapowitt in the town for which it was named, shortly before Steve moved away. It is at once a tribute to his birthplace and a keepsake.