I really don’t like candy. In fact, I even hate the smell of candy! But… You can wake me up for caramel in any form or shape! When I was a kid, we used to get a tin of wrapped English ‘quality’ toffees for Christmas. My favourites were the big, flat chewy caramels in a bright purple wrapper! Chewy Caramel is a happy handmade font, ideal for book covers, candy wrappers and labels. Comes with double-letter ligatures for the lower case.

Elbow Grease was made with, yes, you’ve guessed it: Elbow Grease! It started off as a grungy font, but it didn’t look right, so I reworked all the glyphs. Then I forgot to save the font, so I had to start all over again. Naming a font was never this easy! Elbow Grease is a didone-ish font with some seriously warped glyphs, a lot of panache and a ‘get-it-done’ attitude. Also comes with a toolkit full of diacritics.

The name “Fiction Crusader” was generated by a random word generator. It may sound odd, but I like the feel of it. Use your imagination: what exactly is a fiction crusader? Each letter has 6 slightly different versions, and they automatically cycle as you type. A great way to make your text look more lively and vibrant! I guess that this is an all-purpose font, because I can’t think of a project that couldn’t use a font like this!

Morgenfrisk is one of those words you cannot really translate: it is Danish for ‘feeling refreshed after a good night’s sleep’. Morgenfrisk font is a handmade, thin school class font - very legible, very neat and very nice too. I found the original letters in a Speedball™ Text Book. There were only so many of them, so I designed the missing ones myself. I adjusted some of the original letters to a more contemporary look. Comes with a frisk amount of diacritics!

I have never stayed at a boarding house myself, but I’ve heard some horror stories. When I have finished painting the three fonts (using Chinese ink and a small brush), I didn’t have to think long for a name. Boarding House family consists of three distinct hand painted fonts - the complement each other, but can be used separately as well. Use Boarding House for your halloween posters, mystery novels or websites. All fonts come with an attic full of diacritics.

I came across a photo of Al Capone and some of his henchmen when searching the internet for something completely unrelated. We don’t have a history of notorious gangsters in Holland, so I was intrigued by Capone all of my life. Packing Heat is 1930’s slang for ‘carrying a gun’, which I thought befitted this handmade font with an early 20th century look. Packing Heat comes with multilingual support and a set of alternates for the lower case glyphs.

No, I am not leaving and none of my friends or relatives have packed up and left. I needed a more ‘letter-like’ name for this font and I found Adieu Mon Ami (farewell, my friend in French). Adieu Mon Ami is a handmade pencil font that will add that extra ‘je ne sais quoi’ to your designs. It comes with joie de vivre, un petit peu de vilain, but can be doux comme de la soie as well. Bonne chance!

I was listening to an Opeth album called Blackwater Park. By the time I had decided that this font needed some swirls, the band was playing a song called The Drapery Falls - which has the word ‘spiraling’ in it (see poster 2) - and the name was born. Spiraling down is a surprisingly elegant font (given its roughness). I probably wouldn’t set a whole text in it, but it will really stand out as a titling font for packaging or book covers.

Monde Libre is a display typeface that exudes optimism, joy, and whimsy. I designed this typeface based on a sign in a clip from some old film footage I saw somewhere. It stayed with me as a typeface that evokes the France of my dreams. Enjoy!

Ambleside is a town in the English Lake District. I used to live and work there, so I decided to name a font after it. Ambleside font is a handmade connected script font. It’s a little rough, but loveable nonetheless. Comes with all the diacritics you need!

Liquidambar is actually a beautiful tree, native to America. I have one in my garden and I love its autumn colors! Liquid Amber is something else: it is a handmade all caps font that comes with oodles of diacritics, some swashes and some alternate glyphs. Enjoy!

Pigalle Swing is a very elegant script from the 1950s which I found some time ago in a similar but not so elegant version on Place Pigalle in Paris. I designed lots of alternate capitals and lowercase letters to make the font more usable and interesting. Enjoy!

Paviljoen (meaning Pavilion or Gazebo in Dutch) is an Art Deco typeface which was modeled on cast-iron lettering on some monumental buildings in Amsterdam. I only had a few glyphs to work with, so I designed the remaining ones myself. Paviljoen comes with extensive language support.

shibby adj (etc.). Used to indicate that something is “cool.” Apparently Shibby was first used in the 1999 movie Dude, Where’s My Car? I don’t think Shibby is THE cool word of the moment, but I think it is cool enough for this rather shibby font!

I am not really fond of Garden Gnomes, but this font is kinda cute and I figured it'd be a nice name. Garden Gnome is a very happy, easy to read Children's Book font. It is bouncy, rounded and comes with all the diacritics you need.

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.

In 1990 I designed the font XLeafMeAlone. In 2006 I decided that it was time to improve it. Instead of adding to it, I created two new fonts containing almost 200 leaves: MapleOaks and More Leaves. Among the leaves you will find in MoreLeaves are elm, cottonwood, tulip tree, ash, hickory, locust, ginko, aspen, sassafras, hawthorn, beech, and birch. There are also a few that come from shrubs and I am not sure what they are, but they looked interesting so I put them in. You will not find oaks, maples, or sycamores--they are in MapleOaks. Why leaves? Because people like them. As a large part of the biological world that is all around us, leaves are fascinating in their shapes and endless variations. In XLeafMeAlone I took about 50 shapes and rotated them 180 degrees to give a typeface with approximately 100 glyphs. In each of these two typefaces, MoreLeaves and MapleOaks, there are almost 100 glyphs. Each of those glyphs is rotated in 90-degree increments to yield two families of four typefaces that should be very useful if one wants to create borders of leaves.

Daiquiri is a revival of a handlettered font in two weights, from an ad for Puerto Rico Rum dating back to the forties or fifties. I found the ad on a French antique market on my last visit for Mardi Gras in Nice. The ad read "Breeze through the heat, be a Daiquiri fan". That's why they had this "fan" in the illustration! Did they want you to rotate like a fan when you had enough Daiquiris? Or did they just do it for that little "Jeu des mots"? Anyway I found the handlettering very pretty, so I took those few letters and made a whole font out of them. I think Daiquiri has that touch that brings those happy and uncomplicated times back when advertising was still fun. I started something like 20 years later in advertising and things had gotten more stringent. We already had to satisfy those marketing guys with their scholarly attitude. They have taken all the fun out of the job, for the creators as well as for the consumers. I would like to see more uncomplicated ads like this again, yours Gert Wiescher

Martabat is an monoline script font wich natural movement. I made this font inspired by the concept of simple signature and made it into a modern yet clean style. I also added some ligatures and alternatives swashes that are very interesting when applied. This font is perfect for creating signature logos or just watermarks for your photography studio or print templates like posters, branding, quotes, or anything else. Alternative and swash characters are also available. Very recommended to use in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw.

Traveling through the central and southern parts of Mexico a number of years ago, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the amazing architecture of the indigenous peoples. From the giant pyramids of Teotihuacan to the extensive and impressive layout of Chichén Itzá to the smaller-but-spectacular Monte Alban ruins in Oaxaca, creativity abounds. One of the things I most enjoyed were the carved stone friezes that ran around many of the more complete buildings. Oaxaca calls to mind those beautiful carvings and, strangely, Chinese writing.

The "Architect's Font" for Everyone! Having taught Mechanical Drawing - BC (before computers), I have always wanted to digitize my every day lettering as I have previously done with my calligraphic lettering. Based on my own daily lettering style, which in turn is modeled after the hand lettering of draftsmen and architects, Fran Hand comes with Regular and Italic versions each for the same low price. Use "Fran Hand" for writing letters, fax cover sheets, invoices, spec drawings, or for enjoying a change from the prosaic and commonplace.

DrivEddie was an attempt to create a rough, hand-drawn typeface that was quirky but easily readable. It has a few serifs so it is almost but not quite san serif. All vertical stems are curved. For almost 25 years DrivEddie was a one-font family and one-font families often have limited applications. In 2020 I returned to this typeface to increase its possible uses by adding five new styles: italic, semibold, semibold-italic, bold, and bold-italic. I also corrected mistakes and added characters.

Have you seen that new font from Comicraft it's lovely isn't it all soft and spongy it fair warms the cockles of me heart Mrs Robinson at number forty three she has one she got it down at the store on the corner you know the Indian convenience open all night my Albert gets his Heineken down there late of an evening and you know what I saw all manner of strange people down there last week super heroes I think they were Blimey!

After a few months my new typeface "Bankal" is here! To create it, I always tried to keep a 90 degree angle. In French when you say that something is "bancal" it means that it's not right. This is why I choose this as a name because despite the name she is right. And for the K it's just for the style here. Bankal is a sans-serif font with 3 variations (bold, regular, light) Check more on my website : https://www.hugokuder.com/ or my instagram : hugokuderdesign

Twentieth Century was designed for the cover of 20th Century French Poetry and was drawn with pure geometric shapes. It is the distillation of a broad variety of styles loosely known as Art Deco but, also categorized under such terms as Moderne, Streamline, Machine Age, Futurist, 70s Art Deco, Memphis among others. If there were a source in particular that I would cite as my inspiration, however, it would definitely be the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. I mean, look at the "W" for cryin' out loud!

The dearJoe series of fonts came to life around the year 1999, when I created dearJoe 1, which was a first (and half-assed) attempt to convert my own handwriting into a working font. Being able to type in my own hand had always been a childhood fantasy, and even though I only partly understood the software, a working font was generated and I decided to put it on the internet for people to use in their own personal projects. Which they did: at this moment the dearJoe 1 font has been downloaded millions of times and can be found on Vietnamese riksjas, Tasmanian gyms and chocolate stores on 5th Avenue for instance. The font is not something I am particularly proud of, but it started me of in building what's now the JOEBOB graphics foundry. Inbetween creating other fonts, the dearJoe series has become a theme I revisit every once in a while, trying to create an update on how my handwriting has evolved, along with my abilities in creating fonts that mimic actual handwriting. In the last decade or so I started implementing ligatures and alternate characters, which helped a lot in coming to a result that can almost pass for actual handwriting. The 2019 dearJoe 7 font is the latest addition to this font family. All characters were scanned from handwritten notes, cherrypicking the characters and letter-combinations I liked best. They were written with a Lamy M66 B pen and only minor adjustments were made to the original scans, leaving most little flaws and rough edges as they were for a convincing ball-point on paper result. The font comes with over 150 ligatures, making sure the font has a variated and credible overall look and feel.

Though there are many thousands of digital typefaces available, none seem to be made exclusively of letters that tessellate, a complete tessellating alphabet. This void is now filled with not one typeface, but a group of typefaces, the Tescellations kinship group. Even though I am aware of only one use for this typeface--writing about tessellations--that does not mean there are not hundreds or perhaps thousands of other uses. These typefaces are a byproduct of two maze books I designed, Puzzling Typography and Puzzling Typography A Sequel. I found the challenge of making mazes from tessellations, including letter tessellations, intriguing and these typefaces are a byproduct that endeavor. There are seven members of this typeface kinship group. I tried to select the the glyphs that fit together best to form Tescellations; it is the most readable of the lot. The reason for an Italics version is that I needed one for the maze project. In constructing it, I tried to include as many different lower-case glyphs as I could rather than just skew the regular version. A purist might insist that the tessellation deal with the counters. My approach was to worry only about the exterior of any letter that has an interior, but for anyone who who might object to the counters, versions with filled counters are included. What did not fit into Tescellations was dumped into Tescellations Two, which is somewhat of a ransom-note type of face. It comes in two styles, a regular version and a version in which the counters are removed. TescellationPatterns shows how many of the characters in these typefaces tessellate. It has over 100 tessellation patterns, each on only one character. Simply type several lines with any character and make sure the leading is the same as the font size, and you have an instant tessellation pattern of a letter.

The Enagol Math family consists of 4 weight plus True italics. It is a typeface with rounded Slab-Serif of Semi-Condensed proportions. I have composed all the proportions of the character based on a study of mathematical proportions related to the golden sequences of Perrin, Lucas and Fibonacci. From an initial matrix of golden proportions applied in the letters 'H' for capital letters and 'n' for lowercase letters, calculated for the versions of the extremes of the Light and Bold type, below I do the whole calculation of proportions using my formula of three axes and by interpolation I generate the intermediate versions Regular and Medium. For the Italic versions I have drawn a complete set of lowercase letters that give these fonts an aspect close to the Italic writing. In these versions I have also applied many optical corrections to balance the deformations created in many curves by the mere inclination of the letters, which in the case of this type is 11°.

RoyalBavarian was comissioned by King Ludwig the First of Bavaria about 1834. He was probably the greatest king Bavaria ever had, but he fell in disgrace for a short affair with the infamous Lola Montez and subsequently had to resign. He died in 1868, peaceful and happy in Nice on the French Riviera. I happened on an original etching of his type-guidelines for official writers of those days about 20 years ago. I always thought it was a very nice Fraktur (Blackletter), not a sturdy militaristic one as most of them are. Being me, I started with first tests immediately and then just forgot the font on my computer. When I was sorting out old stuff a couple of months ago I happened on the etchings once again and kept on working intermittently on the letters. The Plain cut is pretty much like the king wanted it. The Fancy cut is more to my liking and very decorative. Yours in a royal mood, Gert Wiescher.

There's nothing really disastrous (impending or not) going on in my life right now, but I have always liked the expression. I thought about it when I watched a news item about the recent storm we had in Europe. The news showed footage of a person narrowly escaping a huge falling tree. Impending Disaster font is certainly no disaster. I created it using my fantastic Chinese ink and a broken tapas skewer (I seemed to have run out of my regular satay skewers). The result is a slightly rough, comic book kinda font. It comes with two sets of alternates for the lower case letters (which cycle as you type), one set of stylistic alternates for the 'O' glyph (and all accented O's), an alternate ampersand, asterisk, question mark and exclamation mark and a set of alternate numerals. Impending Disaster comes with extensive language support, including Vietnamese, Greek and Sami - so don't come running and say you didn't have any options! ;-)

Doretypo was born accidentally, during the design of a poster for a jazz festival in Rome. I was going to realize a typesetting, but I could not find the right character and decided to draw the letters I needed, starting from the first letter of the headline, capital M. I was looking for a lettering able to evoke musical notes, where each letter could be linked to the following one, to the previous one, to the largest at the top and the smallest at the bottom. From this idea doretypo came to life gradually. In the beginning there were a few medium capital letters with very few glyphs, but given the good results I decided to decline in light and bold, integrating minuscule letters, for a whole of 374 glyphs. Today doretypo OpenType is a family of fonts with three weights, 374 glyphs, supporting about 57 languages, ligatures standard, plus a new “NY”. Moreover, each glyph can be used individually to create textures and graphic symbols.

Several roads have been closed around my village, so I need to drive alongside narrow country roads ro get my groceries done. The roads are so narrow that two cars cannot pass, so you need to use the (muddy) kerbs. A lot of cars these days have Xenon lights and they shine really bright and blue. I am non xenon-phobic, but I can tell you that the ‘old’ yellowish headlight were softer on the eyes, especially when you’re trying to navigate narrow country roads! Yes, I know, a long story leading nowhere, but a little personal story (in my opinion) is better than a boring text full of technical bla bla. A font is a font after all and I don’t need to explain what it looks like, because you can see that for yourself! Headlight Blue is a handmade, all caps display font. It comes with all the trimmings, including two sets of alternates that cycle as you type.

ITC Johann Sparkling is the work of Austrian designer Viktor Solt, a perfect imitation of the handwriting of an educated person of the 18th century. ITC Johann Sparkling is intended to close the gap between highly formal copperplate scripts and the scribbled look of 'true' handwriting," says Solt. "I am not very interested in highly formal and perfect calligraphy, but rather in quick, personal-looking scripts. Usually I start with some historical samples in mind, but I do not try to copy these sources. Instead, I incorporate them into my own handwriting. It takes up to two weeks, and many sheet of paper, before the respective script becomes my own. Of course, this would not be an economic approach for individual lettering jobs, but I can conserve the custom script for future use by digitizing it." ITC Johann Sparkling should be used in fairly large point sizes and its capitals only as initials.

Over the past couple of years I received quite a number of unusual and surprising requests to modify my type designs to suit projects of personal nature, but none top the ones that asked me to typeset and modify tattoos using Burgues Script or Adios. At first the whole idea was amusing to me, kind of like an inside joke. I had worked in corporate branding for a few years before becoming a type designer, and suddenly I was being asked to get involved in personal branding, as literally “personal” and “branding” as the expression can get. After a few such requests I began pondering the whole thing from a professional perspective. It was typography, after all, no matter how unusual the method or medium. A very personal kind of typography, too. The messages being typeset were commemorating friends, family, births, deaths, loves, principles, and things that influenced people in a deep and direct way, so much so that they chose to etch that influence on their bodies and wear it forever. And when you decide to wear something forever, style is of the essence. After digging into the tattooing scene, I have a whole new respect for tattoo artists. Wielding that machine is not easy, and driving pigment into people’s skin is an enormous responsibility. Not to mention that they're some of the very few who still use a crafty, hands-on process that is all but obsolete in other ornamentation methods. Some artists go the extra mile and take the time to develop their own lettering for tattooing purposes, and some are inventive enough to create letters based on the tattoo’s concept. But they are not the norm. Generally speaking, most tattoo artists use generic type designs to typeset words. Even the popular blackletter designs have become quite generic over the past few decades. I still cringe when I see something like Bank Script embedded into people’s skin, turning them into breathing, walking shareholder invitations or government bonds. There’s been quite a few attempts at making fonts out of whatever original tattoo designer typefaces can be found out there - wavy pseudo-comical letters, or rough thick brush scripts, but as far as I could tell a stylish skin script was never attempted in the digital age. And that’s why I decided to design Piel Script. Piel is Spanish for skin. In a way, Piel Script is a removed cousin of Burgues Script. Although the initial sketches were infused with some 1930s showcard lettering ideas (particularly those of B. Boley, whose amazing work was shown in Sign of the Times magazine), most of the important decisions about letter shapes and connectivity were reached by observing whatever strengths and weaknesses can be seen in tattoos using Burgues. Tattoos using Adios also provided some minor input. In retrospect, I suppose Affair exercised some influence as well, albeit in a minor way. I guess what I'm trying to say is there is as much of me in Piel Script as there is in any of the other major scripts I designed, even though the driving vision for it is entirely different from anything else I have ever done. I hope you like Piel Script. If you decide it to use it on your skin, I'll be very flattered. If you decide to use it on your skateboard or book cover, I'll be just as happy. Scripts can't get any more personal than this. Piel Script received the Letter2 award, where they selected the best 53 typefaces of the last decade, organised by ATypI.

FangsALot is a bizarre typeface family that was designed to alternate two character sets. These sets are alternated automatically in applications that support the OpenType feature Contextual Alternatives (calt). The template used to design characters is a distorted triangle that resembles a curved tooth or a fang. This shape can be flipped horizontally, vertically, and both horizontally and vertically to give four orientations. Two of these orientations are used in the regular style and two in what is called the italic style. I thought the fang motif did not come through clearly in the regular and italic styles. Rather the impression they give is more like graffiti lettering. To emphasize the fang motif I added two more members to the family by filling fang outlines with unadorned sans-serif characters. Then to allow more color in lettering, I added two more styles with letters on black. I then had six styles based on triangles skewed left and right. Why not fill the family out with three more styles based on an isosceles triangle? The end result is a family of nine. All members of the family are monospaced and are hard to read. The three graffiti-like styles have some alternative letters that can be accessed with the OpenType feature Stylistic Sets. Also, for each style it is possible to use only one set of characters by adding a space after each letter and then adjusting the character spacing. The graffiti-like styles can be useful in situations where the hard-to-read property is not important but where a menacing and vicious touch is needed, such as topics of sharks, teeth, biting, and vampires.

Zushboy is a ragged verion of my own tagging style (even though it has been years and years since I did a thing like that!). The font is spaced tight in order to copycat a real homeboy's handwriting! Yo!

After researching the type styles contemporary graphic designers have been using over the past few years, I noticed a consistent use of Copperplate Gothic, and its derivative designs, for various corporate advertising campaigns. That level of usage gave me the inspiration to design a display font possessing subtle characteristics of Copperplate Gothic, and various Latin Condensed designs. The font I ended up designing was semi-condensed, with more contrast between thicks and thins than in Copperplate. Baltra also has a subtle flair in its otherwise traditional lowercase, while possessing a larger than average lowercase x-height. Copperplate Gothic, on the other hand, has minimal contrast and uses small capitals for its lowercase. After examining extensive type specimens from wood type, metal type, phototype and digital type, I was not able to find a single design possessing a majority of Baltra's characteristics. Consequently, I consider Baltra to be a truly unique design, sharing with Copperplate Gothic only its flairs on stems, and having only subtle characteristics in common with traditional Latin designs.

Nyata™ — Clearly Visible, No Matter What. I love London for its finest visual branding, especially its Johnston typeface spreading all over the city. It inspired me to create this new font family: Nyata™. Nyata means clearly visible in Indonesian. The typeface is designed to be clean, unique, and legible. It is a great combination for any display requiring high legibility, such as city’s way finder. Long ascenders help some characters more obvious. You will never confuse wether it is an h or an n. Moreover, I tried to create all the letters are distinguishable. Of course, no time for people to doubt between Uppercase “I” and lowercase “l” when seeing a way finder. Last but not least, it is equipped with tons of OpenType features such as slashed zero to help the words more obvious, or stylistic sets if you don’t fancy the serifed uppercase I. Nyata™ is also delivered in Variable Font format. Enjoy all the styles and everything in between in one variable font only sized less than 150kb.

Éric de Berranger likes to multitask, and often works on two typeface families at once. Such was the case with Mosquito, a jaunty sans that was developed at the same time he was creating the more traditional Maxime. Mosquito represented a sort of recreation," says de Berranger. "When I grew tired of working on one design I could work on the other and then come back to the first, full of courage and desire!" Mosquito is built from simple, straightforward shapes, but its distinctive stroke terminals and slight oblique weight stress distinguish the design from more conventional sans serif faces. The relatively large x-height and open counters add to the legibility of the design. The capitals are straightforward (with just a hint of Peignot), while the lowercase has a softer, more inviting demeanor. "I drew Mosquito with the hope that it would be pleasant to look at and to read," says de Berranger. "I think the end result is almost feminine." Mosquito comes in three weights, with complementary italic designs and a suite of small caps, old style figures and alternate characters."