Hand sketched lettering in a chalkboard, Pinterest inspired style.

Trade Gothic Next is Akira Kobayashi's 2008 revision of Jackson Burke's 1948 design. Developed over many years, the original Trade Gothic was filled with many inconsistencies. Under the direction of Akira Kobayashi, Linotype's Type Director, the american type designer Tom Grace, a graduate of the MA Typeface Design in Reading, was commissioned to redesign, revise, and expand the Trade Gothic family. Kobayashi and Grace refined many details such as the terminals and stroke endings, symbols, and the spacing and kerning. Moreover, there are newly added compressed widths and heavy weights perfect for setting even more powerful headlines. The Regular weight has been beefed up making it stronger and more robust in text settings. Trade Gothic is a staple of the advertising and newspaper industries, and now Trade Gothic Next brings more features and better quality for today's astute typographers. In addition several weights are available as soft rounded versions.

VAG Rounded Next Variable Regular is a single font file that features one axis: Weight. For your convenience, the Weight axis has preset instances from Light to Extra Black. This Roman (upright) font is provided as an option to customers who do not need Italics, and want to keep file sizes to a minimum.

A WPA poster announcing the latest production by—guess who?—the Big Tent Players inspired this eye-catching, if somewhat unconventional, typeface. Both versions of the font include the 1252 Latin and 1250 CE character sets (with localization for Romanian and Moldovan).

Jumpin’ Jack Extended is a fun, cartoon-like display font capable of taking any product out of the ordinary! Use it on bold and bright creations such as banners, posters, covers, titles, magazines, etc. This bouncy fun font is a perfect addition to your collection!

An original slab serif design inspired by the slab serif designs of the 19th century, with a modern geometric look, bold version, extended.

In 1948, Mergenthaler Linotype released the first weights of Trade Gothic, designed by Jackson Burke. Over the next 12 years, Burke, who was the company’s Director of Typographic Development from 1948 through 1963, continued to expand the family. Trade Gothic Next is the 2008 revision of Jackson Burke’s design. Developed over a prolonged period of time, the original Trade Gothic showed many inconsistencies. Under the direction of Linotype’s Type Director Akira Kobayashi, American type designer Tom Grace, a graduate of the MA Typeface Design in Reading, has redesigned, revised and expanded the Trade Gothic family. Many details were improved, such as the terminals and stroke endings, symbols, and the spacing and kerning. Moreover, there are newly added compressed widths and heavy weights perfect for setting even more powerful headlines. Trade Gothic Next brings more features and better quality for today’s demanding typographers. Trade Gothic Next Soft Rounded introduces a new friendliness and warmth to the family.

This font has been developed based on the engraving by the German artist Daniel Hopfer (1470-1536) listing the Latin ABC. While creating the font I tried to preserve the archaism and certain imperfection characteristic for the prototype to accentuate its charm. Fanciful convolution on the serif make it a bit fairy-tale like and cheerful. The font is also available with decorated dots as in the original version. All the letters in the font are capital.

Bigband was designed by Karlgeorg Hoefer in 1974. The font lends text a sense of unpredictablility and change due to the irregular design of the inner areas and outer contours of the characters. Bigband is available in two weights, Bigband and Bigband Terrazzo, which can be combined effectively. Bigband is a striking and modern display font which lends itself to numerous applications.

Papillon Woodcuts is a digital revival of an ornate alphabet by French engraver Jean Michel Papillon dating back to 1760, when engraving was very fashionable in France. Each letter is displayed with a different themed background, such as a ship at sea; a fancy table topped with a bounty of fruits; flying birds; a parasol with flowers; playful cherubs; rich textured drapes and tapestries; and many more. These woodcut initials are especially beautiful when used at the beginning of a paragraph as in olden texts.

The Parliament typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler beginning in 1995. A burlesque typeface in the Regency Blackletter style, Parliament was inspired by the ‘Four-line Pica Black No. 1’ typeface of William Caslon Jr (1821), whose enigmatic design for the letters E, G, I, N, V and Y hinted at a broader ambition to modernize the arcane shapes of the gothic alphabet’s capital letters. Parliament completes this project for the first time by including two sets of alphabets, one archaic and one modern, along with a third set of ‘small caps’ that restores to the blackletter the versatility of Roman type. Parliament was first used for the 1998 ATypI Conference in Lyon, and was published by Hoefler&Co in 2022.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved blackletter typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Engraved display typeface.

Fashion Compressed and Engraved are the works of British designer Alan Meeks. Fashion Compressed is an elegant modern roman typeface suitable for a variety of advertising styles. The capitals can be used as initials or combined with the lower case letters. Fashion Engraved was produced when Meeks reworked Fashion Compressed, resulting in a beautiful, engraved typeface.

Sweet Upright Script is the first release for Sweet Fonts Collection, published by MVB Fonts. It is an interpreted revival of a vintage, social engraving lettering style that was popular during the 20th Century. It is probably the first digital version of the design. With the advent of the engraving machine (a pantograph device) around 1900, commercial engraving moved from the use of hand-cut plates to the use of masterplates (lettering patterns). Lettering was traced from the masterplate using the engraving machine, letter by letter, onto a coated steel plate, that would then be etched in a chemical bath. The resulting plate was used to print engraved stationery with the raised print distinctive to the process. Many of these lettering styles were used for decades for commercial and social applications (letterheads, wedding invitations, etc.), but as they were merely traced alphabets, were not "fonts". Many remain unavailable in digital form. Over time, a number of the most popular styles were adapted to phototype, which sped up the process of plating for engraving, avoiding the need to trace each letter by hand with the engraving machine. Later, when type went digital, these phototype fonts were revived as digital fonts. As a result, the styles offered by engravers narrowed over time, as has the range of engraving styles revived in digital form.

Engraved shaded display typeface.

Decorative, Display, Headline, Serif, 1920s, Hand Lettered, Engraved, Incised, Bold, Extra Bold, Retro, Vintage, Nostalgic An ad in the July 27, 1928 issue of The Film Daily for FBO Pictures was an encouragement to all theaters to accept the emergence of 'talking pictures' and "Don't be Panicked by Sound". The headline text was hand lettered in an extra bold serif type face with engraved [incised] lines. The lettering has been redrawn as the digital type face Movie Usher JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

This family was inspired from a lot of 1848-1850 French engraved documents reproducing handwritten texts talking about the Paris' insurrection days in June 1848 (described by Victor Hugo in Les misérables) . It seems that all were first written using quill pens, as the strokes are too much heavy and bold for metal pens and even though the engraver work is very fine. We have added only a few characters, most of them were present in the originals. The TTF and OTF versions are enriched with more than 50 ligatures or alternate characters.

A rare natural history book from the early 18th century served as inspiration for the MVB Sirenne typefaces. The artisan who engraved the book—likely a map engraver—had a distinctive style of lettering that was used on the descriptive captions for the many tropical fishes depicted in the book. The plates used to print the illustrations would have been copper, the letterforms hand-engraved. The designers at MVB Fonts found the distinctive quirks of the roman letterforms and the eccentric stress of the italic interesting enough to embark on developing digital fonts based on the engraved samples. As the captions were hand-lettered, there was a great degree of variation, making a direct “revival” impossible, so Alan Dague-Greene interpreted the characteristics of the letterforms into a workable typeface design. The challenge was to retain a rustic quirkiness to the forms, yet have a typeface that was useful for more than display. The solution was to make optical sizes. The “Six” faces are full of character, but strong and open for clarity at small sizes. The design of the “Text” faces is more subtle, so that they can be used for passages of text, but retain the feel of their model. MVB Sirenne “Eighteen” and “Seventy Two” are intended for display use.

The English roundhand has always occupied the central position in the group of faces appropriate to the social printing handled by engravers, and their contemporary imitators, thermographers. At the end of the nineteenth century when engraving was mechanised by the pantographic engraving machine, the traditional roundhands found their way onto pantographic pattern plates. Embassy is a traditional roundhand of vigorous contrast with straightforward capitals with ball terminals; it was transferred from such an engravers’ pattern plate to the Fotosetter at Intertype about 1955. Alphatype’s Yorktown is similar, but appears to have less contrast.

Salto was developed by Karlgeorg Hoefer and introduced in 1952 by the foundry Gebr. Klingspor in Offenbach. The capital letters were drawn with a brush, the lower case with a broad-tipped pen developed by Hoefer especially for the task. Salto reflects the Zeitgeist of the 1950s, appearing frequently in advertisements during the years of the Wirtschaftswunder. The font’s extravagance and dynamic quality arise from the contrast between the strong, zestful capitals and the more reserved lower case letters.