Rudolph Ruzicka designed his font Fairfield as a legible text font. His philosophy: The reader expects optical assistance with reading. He does not want to be distracted while interpreting and understanding the ideas of a text." Fairfield font is based on the forms of Venecian Old Face fonts as well as on the designs and details of Art Deco, giving the font a distinctive appearance"

Pirouette is based on a logo that Japanese designer Ryuichi Tateno created for a packaging design project in 1999 (a shampoo container!). Tateno's logo experimented with complex, overlapped swash letterforms. He continued to develop these outside of the initial packaging project, until they took on a life of their own. Eventually, Tateno designed a full typeface out of the logo, Pirouette, which was the first place display face in Linotype's 2003 International Type Design Contest. The Pirouette typeface contains six different fonts. The basic font is Pirouette Regular. This is an engraver's italic lowercase paired with elaborate swash capitals. The swash capitals have two visual elements in their forms: thick strokes and thin strokes. Pirouette Text includes the same lowercase as Pirouette Regular, but the uppercase letters are much shorter and simpler. This "text" font can be used to set longer amounts of copy. Pirouette Alternate contains different lowercase glyphs and additional ligatures, which can be used as substitutes for the lowercase forms in the Pirouette Regular and Pirouette Text fonts. Pirouette Ornaments contains swashes and other knick-knacks that can either be added onto the end of a letter, or used as separate decorative elements or swooshes (accolades) on a page. Pirouette Separate 1 and Pirouette Separate 2 are two fonts that can be layered over top of one another in software applications that support layering (e.g., most Adobe and Macromedia applications, as well as QuarkXPress). Pirouette Separate 1 contains the thick stroke elements from Pirouette Regular's uppercase letters, as well as the same lowercase glyphs that can be found in Pirouette Regular and Pirouette Text. Pirouette Separate 2 contains only the thin stroke elements from Pirouette Regular's uppercase letters. By layering Pirouette Separate 1 and Pirouette Separate 2 over one another, you can give the uppercase letter's thick and thin stroke elements different colors and create unique, more calligraphic designs. The Pirouette family, Tanteno's first commercial typeface, was greatly influenced by the calligraphic and typographic work of the master German designer, Prof. Hermann Zapf, especially his Zapfino typeface.

L-O-L-A Like the subject of the Kinks’ song, FS Lola is a little bit of both – a font with a rare combination of masculine and feminine. The font was inspired by the song, which itself was inspired by the night the Kinks’ manager spent dancing drunkenly in a Soho club with a beautiful woman... Or so he’d thought, until her stubble started to show halfway through the evening. Masculine/feminin Phil Garnham’s experience in designing FS Lola was similar to the one related by Ray Davies. Setting out to create a sans serif font, he realised along the way that he was actually dealing with a semi-serif. He went with it, though, and produced a font with the best masculine and feminine qualities: hard edges and corners tempered by shapes of softness and generosity, the outcome of what Phil calls an “organic” design process. “Initially, my designs were very graphic and hard but not very distinctive. By printing and redrawing the letters in pencil I achieved a softer and friendlier alphabet with a strong personality.” Broad Lola, as you’d expect, is very broad-minded. Available in five weights with italics – and fluent in central European languages – FS Lola offers a confident combination of feminine softness and male steeliness to any kind of design. As the song says, “It’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world... except for Lola.

Franz Kafka’s manuscripts have always been a source of inspiration for designer Julia Sysmäläinen. At first she was just interested in literary aspects but later she noticed that content and visual form can not be separated in the work of this ingenious writer. Analyzing Kafka’s handwriting at the Berlin National Library, Julia was inspired to design the typeface FF Mister – by now a well known classic. Over the years, FF Mister K became a handsome typeface family and even produced offspring: the Josef K Patterns. Some of Kafka’s most expressive letterforms were the starting point for these decorative ornaments. How do the Patterns work? Outlines and fillings correspond to the uppercase and the lowercase letters on your keyboard. You can use them separately or layer them on top of each other. If you write a line of “pattern-text” in lowercase and repeat it underneath in uppercase you get a row of fillings followed by a row of outlines. Now you can color them and then set line space = 0 to get a single line of layered colored ornaments. Alternatively, activating OpenType / stylistic set / stylistic alternates will also unite the two lines to a single layered line. Further magic can be done with OpenType / contextual alternates turned on. On the gallery page of this font family is a downloadable Josef K Patterns.pdf with an alphabetical overview of forms. Hundreds of patterns are possible … we’d love to see some of yours and present them here on the website!

Basic Commercial is a font based on historical designs from the hot metal typeface era. It first appeared around 1900, and was created by type designers whose names have not been recorded but whose skills cannot be overlooked. This typeface's design has been popular among groups and movements as diverse as the Bauhaus, Dadaism, and the masters of Swiss/International-Style typography. It influenced for a variety of later grotesque fonts, such as Helvetica and Univers. Basic Commercial was distributed for many years in the United States under the name Standard Series. The typeface worked its way into many aspects of daily life and culture; for instance, it became the face chosen for use in the New York City subway system's signage. The Basic Commercial's font family members have a clear and objective design. Their forms exhibit almost nothing unusual, but remain both lively and legible nonetheless. Perhaps for this reason, Basic Commercial's design has been popular with graphic designers for decades. To read more about the history of typefaces like Basic Commercial, visit our font feature, The Sans Serif Typefaces. In addition several weights of this typefamily are available as soft rounded versions."

FleurCross is a set of 76 stylized crosses designed by calligrapher Michael Clark. This diverse range of cruciform ornaments features many variations on the theme of the cross.

The basic forms stem from Erich Mollowitz' version which he cut for Trennert in 1936. These fonts were completely redrawn, extended with East European letterforms and some OpenType features. They are well suited for more formal invitations, headlines and subtitles, for diplomas and certificates.

Article to appear on the font family page: According to the Catholic faith, a well known náhuatl story called "Nican Mopohua" (translated as "Here it's narrate") about the Marianas apparitions on the Tepeyac's hill, to the north of the actual Mexico City. After four apparitions, La Virgen de Guadalupe (LVG) told Juan Diego (JD) that he must introduce himself to the first Bishop of Mexico. JD took in his "ayate" some roses (that aren't natives to Mexico's barren territories) and when he dropped them in front of the bishop, the image of LVG appeared in front of him with indigenous features. I’ve worked a lot in this font that appears to came out of nowhere, just like the image of LVG itself, the fact is that I started first sketching some flowers, because I wanted to do something related to this mexican story, so, taking some features from this flowers I started sketching some letters, for example “r” and “i” and the counter forms for some letters like “a” and “o” (that I didn’t use by the way) and the punctuation marks, all inspired by this leaf forms. Lighter weight coming soon! Hope you like it. Any comments: rodrigonabo@gmail.com

The story of Serena is a unique one among revivals. Serena was neither a metal face nor a film one. In fact it never went anywhere beyond Stefan Schlesinger’s 1940-41 initial sketches (which he called Saranna). A year later, while working with Dick Dooijes on the Rondo typeface, Schlesinger was sent to a concentration camp where he died, along with any material prospects for the gorgeous letters he'd drawn. The only sketches left of Schlesinger’s Saranna work are found in the archives of the Drukkerij Trio (the owner of which was Schlesinger’s brother-in-law). The sketches were done in pencil and ink over pencil on four sheets of paper. And now Hans van Maanen revives Schlesinger’s spirit as closely as the drawings permit, and elaborately expands the work to cover a multitude of codepages and languages. It took more than 65 years for Schlesinger’s drawings to see the light, so van Maanen made sure to bring them to life stylishly and respectfully. Serena embodies the peace and calm rarely ever found in mainstream calligraphy or other genres of display type. With upright elegance and a slight Eastern touch, this typeface expertly bridges the gracefully casual with the deeply spiritual. The light and soft letter forms add a pleasant, breezy element to anything they touch. When used sparingly in titling or display, Serena is like a sigh of desire, rare but quite memorable and very appreciated.

POWERPLAY a monospace lowercase alphabet with a 3D twist. Designed by André Toet in 1976 (during his study at Central School of Art & Design, London, UK) and he redesigned this in 2011. The name Powerplay is based on the Battersea Power Station, London. The remarkable architecture of the building is also used as a decor for films and for one of the covers by Pink Floyd (Animals, the flying pig). Concept/Art Direction/ Design: André Toet © 2017

Johabu is based on Gebrochene Fraktur, a lighter softer sort of type, compared to the German forms of the same period. Johabu was drawn by Johannes Bureus, around 1620, cut and cast by Peter van Selow in Stockholm. Johannes Bureus, archaeologist and linguist, designed and let Selow cast runes in 1598, and he became the first Swedish keeper, archivist, of the National Record Office State Archives.

Two years ago I went on a camping holiday in England with my wife and (then two) small children. The first stop was a nature campsite near the village of Bodiam in East Sussex. My son wanted to see a real castle, so I figured Bodiam Castle was the 'realest' of them all! He loved it, as the castle had a moat, crenellated walls, a bunch of towers and a guy dressed up as a knight. Bodiam font is a rough didone-ish affair. It is all caps, but you can freely mix upper and lower case. It would be ideal for book covers, posters and maybe even for castles. Comes with a treasure chest of diacritics.

Linotype Franosch™ is a three weight display typeface designed by artist/graphic designer Max Franosch. Around the time of making the initial sketches, Franosch was looking a lot at Arabic newspaper and magazine headlines. He was drawn to their bold and very graphic" type. A common feature was the "floating" dots which added a rhythmic quality to the text. This came to influence the use of dots in Linotype Franosch™. Apart from this influence, Linotype Franosch also has a very clean and futuristic feel to it, due mainly to the highly geometric nature of the characters and the uniform stroke weight. More about the usability of this typeface can be seen at the Font of the Week of Linotype Franosch. Linotype Franosch is perfect for party flyers, headlines, and internet banner ads. All three faces in the Linotype Franosch family are part of the Take Type 4 collection from Linotype."

Drawn by master German calligrapher Hermann Zapf in the 1970s, Noris Script captures the magic of the irregularities of pen strokes. The idea behind Noris Script was to bring the spontaneity of a quick handwritten script using a broad-edged pen into the modern typesetting environment. Noris is the Latin name for the German city of Nuremberg, where Hermann Zapf was born and raised. Nuremberg has something special about it, aside from Hermann Zapf, it has a great tradition of writing masters, such as Johann Neudörffer (1497-1563), Wolfgang Fugger (1515-1568), and Rudolf Koch (1876-1934).

Comenia was developed as typographic system for use on all levels of schools and universities. It introduces new aesthetic standards aimed at improving reading and writing skills and the perception of texts for pupils, students, teachers, office and IT staff at schools. It offers a clear, intelligible and universal graphic tool for layout of primers, textbooks, educational texts and materials, for electronic typography and for the information systems.

The font extra bold slab serif with reverse contrast, he refers to the “Italian” or “wood types”. This decorative display font is designed for use in large sizes, suitable for the lettering, the major labels, headers, logotypes. Ideal for embedding images. It's an all-caps font, but there are biform variants of a, e, m, n and u, so you can mix things up to create more interesting headlines. This font contains the complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252) plus support for Cyrillic (Unicode 1251), Central/Eastern Europe (Unicode 1250), Baltic (Unicode 1257) and Turkish (Unicode 1254) languages as well.

Workhorse is a Sign Painter’s Gothic developed by Master Sign Painter Greg Reid. Workhorse captures the true essence of hand lettering. From the tapered waists to the elegant snaps of the brush; these elements present a warmth unseen in today’s mechanically stiff Gothics. Greg Reid and Charles Borges de Oliveira collaborated to bring this truly one of a kind typeface to fruition. With the power of Open type, Workhorse utilizes Contextual Alternates to create random variations of the capitals and lowercase letters. This allows your text to have subtle differences in the letters without losing form which helps to create an honest hand lettered look. This feature can be turned on or off to suit your individual style. You also have the ability to manually choose the glyph variations from the glyph pallet to help you create one of kind designs. Both versions of Workhorse feature complete variations of the capitals and lowercase letters (56 total), Small Caps and six alternates. The Small Caps are not just the capitals scaled down. They have been designed as a unique second set that adjusts the stroke thickness to match the existing letters, creating what we like to refer to as “Real Small Caps”. Workhorse is a timeless classic that can be used from early Americana advertising all the way up to present day modern use.
 No matter how you use Workhorse it always looks and reads well.

In the course of the re-vitalization of its Typoart typeface inventory, Elsner+Flake decided in 2006 to offer the “Kis Antiqua” by Hildegard Korger, in a re-worked form and with an extended sortiment, as an OpenType Pro-version. After consultation with Hildegard Korger, Elsner+Flake tasked the Leipzig type designer Erhard Kaiser with the execution of the re-design and expansion of the sortiment. Detlef Schäfer writes in “Fotosatzschriften Type-Design+Schrifthersteller”, VEB Fachbuchverlag Leipzig, 1989: No other printing type has ever generated as far-reaching a controversy as this typeface which Jan Tschichold called the most beautiful of all the old Antiqua types. For a long time, it was thought to have been designed by Anton Janson. In 1720 a large number of the original types were displayed in the catalog of the „Ehrhardische Gycery“ (Ehrhardt Typefoundry) in Leipzig. Recently, thanks to the research performed by Beatrice Warde and especially György Haimann, it has been proven unambiguously that the originator of this typeface was Miklós (Nicholas) Tótfalusi Kis (pronounced Kisch) who was born in 1650 in the Hungarian town of Tótfal. His calvinistic church had sent him to the Netherlands to oversee the printing of a Hungarian language bible. He studied printing and punch cutting and earned special recognition for his Armenian and Hebrew types. Upon his return to Hungary, an emergency situation forced him to sell several of his matrice sets to the Ehrhardt Typefoundry in Leipzig. In Hungary he printed from his own typefaces, but religious tensions arose between him and one of his church elders. He died at an early age in 1702. The significant characteristics of the “Dutch Antiqua” by Kis are the larger body size, relatively small lower case letters and strong upper case letters, which show clearly defined contrasts in the stroke widths. The “Kis Antiqua” is less elegant than the Garamond, rather somewhat austere in a calvinistic way, but its expression is unique and full of tension. The upper and lower case serifs are only slightly concave, and the upper case O as well as the lower case o have, for the first time, a vertical axis. In the replica, sensitively and respectfully (responsibly) drawn by Hildegard Korger, these characteristics of this pleasantly readable and beautiful face have been well met. For Typoart it was clear that this typeface has to appear under its only true name “Kis Antiqua.” It will be used primarily in book design. Elsner+Flake added these two headline weights, which are available besides a separate font family Kis Antiqua Now TB Pro. Designer: Miklós (Nicholas) Tótfalusi Kis, 1686 Hildegard Korger, 1986-1988 Erhard Kaiser, 2008

Introducing Magnetic Script, a bold stylized font family that is not only eye-catching and assertive, but highly legible at both display and text sizes. The heart of this font's usefulness is the three-layer setup that allows you to quickly copy a text block twice, then reassign the main layer, the extruded shadow underlayer, and the top highlight layer to three different colors. Magnetic Script is massively versatile, and appropriate for many uses including university / collegiate logos, sports team logos, graphics for motorcycle clubs, automotive rallies, microbrewery labels, and vintage & retro styles of all kinds. It's the ultimate branding and logo design font suite.

Headlock is a handmade serif. My 6 year old son just had his first real Judo exam and the one thing he excels at is the headlock. Headlock comes with double letter ligatures and all the diacritics you need, plus basic Cyrillic!

A warm duo of fonts in front of you! This is a super duo with lots of ligature. This is perfect for logos, wedding invitations, easter, posters, business cards, logos, headlines, Instagram stories, youtube stories, book cover, poster promotion and many more! Get the best pairing fonts with Chelsea Olivia!

Linotype Gavotte was designed by Rudo Spemann in 1940. His style was unmistakable, marked by original ideas and completely new forms. His tendency toward the unusual and adventurous resulted in unique, decorative characters. When he wrote, the tip of his pen flew across the page, leaving behind rows of letters which displayed an almost unbelievable regularity of form and flow. Gavotte is a perfect example of the best of Spemann’s calligraphy.

E-Lie is based on the logo for the Portland band E-Lie. Jon Lincicum designed the logo, and then the basic shapes of the principal letters and numbers. He then gave these designs to Shaun Kennedy, who expanded the design, adding punctuation, accented letters, and math symbols. Shaun then compiled the designs into an OpenType font, adding kerning and ligature information. The design is a distinctive, stylistic font excellent for use when you need to grab someone's attention.

Here’s a classic face from Dutch master type designer Sjoerd H. de Roos. Use it where timeless elegance is the goal. Both versions of this font support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

Flexion developed out of design philosophy and ambigramatic artwork of John Langdon. Based on the contents in John’s book Wordplay, author Dan Brown hired John to create ambigrams for his forthcoming novel Angels & Demons. Mr. Brown was so impressed with his work he even named the main character Robert Langdon after John. After the success of Angels & Demons, Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code. When the movie adaptation of that book was in the works, Dan suggested that John create titles for the movie based on ambigrams. John contacted Hal Taylor to create a font based on the lettering treatment to be used for the credits at the end of the movie. Unfortunately, it was decided that the film was running long and the original title concept was scrapped. By this time, Hal was well into developing a full type family, including small caps, alternate characters, lining and ranging figures. John was impressed with the way the design was turning out and decided that it had enough merit to be released as Flexion.

Yes Dear is a hopefully humorous acknowledgement that men and women communicate differently — one of those Mars-Venus things. Women tend to talk about their feelings. Men hide in the cave. It sounds funny, but it can have serious consequences in people’s lives and their relationships. T. D. Jakes deals with the subject effectively in his DVD, He-Motions. We guys need to find our way out of the cave. Our women need to recognize what is going on and gently help us emerge from the cave. Men and women were certainly never meant to be identical, but it would be useful if we could learn to communicate our feelings in more healthy and effective ways. Yes Dear has a full character set, including accented caps. Two empty frames are provided at positions 135 & 137. The Gallery includes a PDF file showing some text and the full character set and a JPG looking out from the cave. A lot going on outside the cave. Be sure and take a look.

Film Noir JNL is a classic Art Deco Alphabet from the brush of the late master sign painter Alf R. Becker, and appeared in Signs of the Times Magazine. Thanks to Tod Swormstedt of ST Media and the American Sign Museum for providing the reference material to make this font.

Corona was designed by C.H. Griffith and appeared with Mergenthaler Linotype in 1941. It is a part of Griffith’s Legibility Group’, on which he began working in 1922 and which contains typefaces especially well-suited to newsprint. Corona is based on forms of the Ionic type, perhaps the first style designed specifically for newspapers. The font is relatively small but gives an impression of strength and modernity.

In 1938, Frederic W. Goudy designed California Oldstyle, his most distinguished type, for the University of California Press. In 1958, Lanston Monotype issued it as Californian. Carol Twombly digitized the roman 30 years later for the University of California; David Berlow revised it for Font Bureau with italic and small caps; Jane Patterson designed the bold. In 1999, assisted by Richard Lipton and Jill Pichotta, Berlow designed the black and the text and display series; FB 1994–99

In 1951 Alessandro Butti cut a fontfamily for Nebiolo which he called Fluidum. Both weights, light and bold, were now revived and named Butti.

Joan Barjau used the pseudonym “Sniff” while working as a cartoonist for the Spanish satirical magazine “El Papus”, and Sniff is also the typeface based on the style of lettering he used for the balloons. Sniff is back in our catalog with a new impetus and an extra style: Open. The four styles incorporate Small Caps, Numerals, ornaments and various OpenType features.

National Champion is an overly confident geometric slab that comes in four weights. He is best suited for those looking for a well colored, balanced and spaced font in the College genre. He's got a 3/4 cap lowercase, lots of language options, opentype fractions and meticulous hinting for web use.

Stencil Patterns JNL collects into one digital file a number of decorative stencil patterns from decades past. These charming illustrations were re-drawn by Jeff Levine using images of vintage oilboard stencils made over fifty years ago. While these are useful as stand-alone embellishments for any print projects, they can also be scaled and printed out onto card or acetate stock for hand-cutting as new stencil templates. A special note of thanks goes to fellow type designer and author, Leslie Cabarga. He supplied the bulk of the images used in designing this font file. There are left and right pointing hands on the parenthesis keys, and a decorative ampersand on its respective key.

The strong, geometric letterforms of this typeface incorporate a heavy outline and were inspired by college and university sportswear, making Stanford an excellent choice for work associated with sports in general.

This font was specifically created for my husband. He teaches 5th grade and wanted a font that was legible enough for students to read but still playful enough to add a touch of whimsy to his classroom. Legible enough for body text but fun enough for titles.

Intellecta Ribbons is an elegant set of ribbons ready for many applications. With this set you can make tags, shopping sale designs, diverse invitations, discount seals, banners, posters or anything you want.

ITC Bauhaus was designed by Edward Benguiat and Victor Caruso in 1975. They based it on a prototype face drawn by Herbert Bayer in 1925 while he was teaching at the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany. ITC Bauhaus has simple geometric shapes and monotone stroke weights. The rounded, open forms and quirky geometric gyrations of ITC Bauhaus will make contemporary graphic designs look both fun and stylish.

Here's an elegant addition to Argentina NF, carefully crafted after the pattern provided by master type designer Morris Fuller Benton in 1919. Both versions of this font support the Latin 1252, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

Friedrich Poppl’s blackletter font, carefully redrawn and redesigned for modern use, named after the Parler master builder family who built the Schwaebisch Gmuend cathedral. This font contains the letter ‚long s‘ which can be reached in two ways. Either you use the OpenType feature ‚historical forms‘, or you type the integral sign + the option key on your keyboard.