Grid inspired typefaces in 6 weights: 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 and 120 language: all latin glyphs

The sheet music for the 1939 tune "Chico's Love Song (Ma-La-Ja Fa-La Pas-Ka Lah-Ta) [Cuban Double Talk]" may have had an odd title, but the main portion of it was hand lettered in an interesting style. Condensed letters with rounded corners complemented by sharp lines and angles give the characters an almost futuristic look, despite the fact that they were designed during the Art Deco era. This became the basis for Song Composer JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The inspiration for this font (as well as the name!) comes from a London cafe I visited years ago. I was fascinated with the handwritten menu - irregular and awkward, yet refreshingly charming. I did my best to recall that particular look by adding 4 slightly different versions of each lowercase letter. The name of the font comes from the speed of the waiter...or the lack of it! But luckily he took his time, otherwise I wouldn't have had the time to really look at the handwritten menu! :)

During the years of physically doing camera-ready paste-up work before the advent of the digital age, clip art books dominated the way stock art was added to a print project. Clip art books were eventually replaced by clip art CDs, DVDs and online download sites, just as the books themselves had replaced the stock photo engravings of the letterpress era. With the kind permission of Graphic Products Corporation, Jeff Levine Fonts offers up a sampling of images found within the pages of Graphic Source clip art books; aptly entitled Classic Clips JNL.

Motley Crew is my last font for 2016. It is quite a lively, quirky and a little bit scary typeface, which will give your designs a little more ‘joie de vivre’. It was made with a soft brush and Chinese ink. The splatter was added after I had painted the glyphs. I forgot to put away my laptop, which now looks like this font… Motley Crew wishes you all the best for the coming year - in a lot of languages, as it comes with a generous splatter of diacritics.

Smiling Cat is a cute little font. It is an adaptation of and older font of mine: Harimau Dua. I have had many requests for a bold version of Harimau, so I started working on it, changed a few glyphs, redid the kerning and cleaned it up. Rather than adding it as an extra bold style to my existing font, I thought it’d be better to launch it as a new one. Smiling Cat is handmade, cute and quirky, it would be ideal for Children’s Book Covers. Comes with a litter of diacritics.

Attic Antique by Three Islands Press. Flipping through a friend’s old hardbound collection of John Burroughs nature essays a while back, I thought it'd be fun to try to develop a typeface with the same uneven, imperfect look to it. I picked and chose among various printed characters, enlarged them somewhat with a photocopier, then hand-rendered each. Had to custom-make some of the accents and symbols, then added a couple goofy dingbats just for the heck of it. The result: an amazingly legible serif family akin to the Century faces.

Fortuna has some resemblance with handtexted characters based, loosely, on the classic italic. But, like Ad Hoc, Fortuna is drawn on a monitor in every detail. The name is Latin and means fate, luck. The composer Carl Orff was actual at the time when I worked with Fortuna, because he had been born 100 years earlier. Orff's Carmina Burana were being introduced on the radio when I was wondering what to call my most recent creation. The song cycle begins with a song to Fortuna: a fated choice of name. Fortuna was released in 1995.

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. Recently I designed a family of seven »Bodonian Script« fonts, that can be mixed with most of my Bodonis. Yours very retro, Gert Wiescher

Modesto Initials had existed as a single font for several years. I recently added a fill font to put color in the Inlines. The Inline font still works by itself. The Fill font works alone too, as an ultra Modesto on steroids. They work best together. Modesto is a loose-knit family based on a signpainters lettering style popular in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It evolved from the lettering I used for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Logo. The Modesto family was not planned. It just happened, a few fonts at a time over about fifteen years. In 2014 seven new Italic fonts and two Chromatic families were added. There is a downloadable MODESTO USER MANUAL PDF in the Gallery section for this family.