In May of this year, I went to Japan with my (then 11 year old) son Sam. It was his dream to visit Japan, probably because of my tall tales, stemming from the time I was a tour guide! Sam really wanted to try all kinds of Japanese delicacies and one day, when walking around Tokyo, we came across a little stall selling Taiyaki. Taiyaki are fish-shaped waffle/cakes with a red bean or sweet potato filling. They are really delicious! This nice ‘oriental looking’ font was made with a broken popsicle stick and Chinese ink. You are now wondering why I always use Chinese ink and not Japanese ink. Well, I have a stash of the Chinese stuff and it’ll last me a lifetime!

Lifeform is a modern display font created as a result of my experiments on the forms of letters. While working on the font, I had ambivalent feelings, on the one hand I liked the individual curved lines, on the other hand they seemed very strange, alien and illogical. It was like looking into a microscope and seeing something strange. I wanted to develop and study these forms as something new, because I had never seen anything similar before. The result is a contrasting font that has both curves and sharp, and smooth lines that resemble some kind of organic matter. The font is well suited for large headlines, posters and covers. Its strange design catches the eye and will not leave the viewer indifferent.

This font is based on the popular and timeless Caslon design and was carefully digitized from the pages of an early 19th century book. I was excited to see some unique design treatments of characters such as the lower case italic 'p', the question mark, and various swash caps that I had never seen before. During the conversion process, I made sure to preserve the worn look of faded ink on old paper by maintaining a subtle level of decay and opacity with each character. For missing characters not found in the book, I created new characters that were faithful to the style of the rest of the family. Used as a text font, The Letterpress Text Family successfully reproduces the appearance of old letterpress lithography.

Cosmic Turtle is the belief that the world is supported by a giant turtle. It is mostly found in Hindu and Chinese mythology and the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. I had to think of this, as the idea of the Cosmic Turtle is referenced to in the 1982 book ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’ by Haruki Murakami - my favourite author. Cosmic Turtle is a font that I made using a broken chop stick and Chinese ink. I was actually trying to create something scary for Halloween, but this is what came out and I quite like it. Cosmic Turtle is a fat display font with rough edges, wobbly glyphs and a set of double letter ligatures for you to play with.

As as a computer programmer, it is my job to stare at screens of text all day. For my first font, I completed a simple monospaced font, Debug, based on my own handwriting. Mickey Mono is much more ambitious: I wanted a humanist design - something with organic curves. It had to be clean and fresh. It had to have the advantages of Debug, like distinctive numerals (to distinguish between 8 and 3) and huge punctuation characters (so I could read complicated Perl one liners). Mickey Mono would be a good friend to me as I struggled through difficult coding tasks. It has a wide range of Latin Extended characters and diacritics, so it can speak French, Portuguese, and Ruby. Enjoy!

Grungy Old Typewriter is based on two typed letters, each on two pages and dated 1901. The results are eroded, rough, irregular and grungy. The final results are a vintage look. As a designer, I wanted as much flexibility as possible, so there are six versions that are designed to work together. Additionally, I decided to keep the grunge and irregularities within the shape and not include surrounding typewriter or paper marks. I leave it to the design to add those elements as desired. One note, the letter spacing is much tighter than an old typewriter. I felt that readability for modern readers suffered from the added space. Of course, you can get that same look by increasing the letter spacing in your favorite design program.

The story of Humana begins with an exclusive volume about some manuscripts in Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, Italy. The title page uses the characters upon which I designed Humana. I suppose they were drawn for that volume. Examining the reproductions in the book I found that the characters on the title page immitate the lettering in a manuscript from the 15th century with Petrarca's Rime volgari". Not bad as origin! But I cannot free myself from the thought that there may be a typeface with that looks, not just a few characters drawn for that volume. My reference books could not give me any answer about that. The name Humana refers to the humanistic era from which the characters originate. Humana was released in 1994.

There's something satisfying about tweaking to perfection a typeface based on the particular style of lettering applied to a particular kind of paper by a particular human hand. One day, in pursuit of this curious sense of satisfaction, I sat down with a porous pad of lined note paper and printed out the alphabet with a ballpoint pen. I found particularly interesting the bulbous ends of the strokes where the ink soaked in. I couldn't help myself: I drew out the rest of the character set, scanned, hand-traced, and -- as with all 3IP font designs -- manipulated every glyph to an obsessive degree. Named it Cedar Street, after a favorite address of mine. Full release has a single medium weight with a thorough character set.

This is a deco-style text OpenType Pro font loosely based on Koch's Locarno as seen in KochAltschrift a recent free German tribute to Koch's work. I was familiar with Meek's Letraset presstype version called Locarno, but I never liked the proportions used by either Meeks or Koch. So I radically revised ascender, descender, and x-height to make them more usable and brought the shapes within my sense of design. Mine is probably closer to Meeks than Koch, but hopefully it is a tribute to both. Astaire looks much more modern and it is much more usable. I added oldstyle figures, small cap figures, small caps, several ligatures, and more. There are an italic, bold, and bold italic also in this family

Sapore is a script font family, mostly monoline, inspired by the elegant handmade signs in the beautiful city of Venice, Italy, where I work and live. Many of these signs were made at the beginning of the 20th century by skillful craftsmen and artists, carrying that distinct vintage Italian flavour, and this is why I named the font Sapore, which means precisely flavour (also, one of the signs is from a pastry shop that makes the most delicious things). The design takes this retro vibe into the 21st century, making it up-to-date and fresh, while keeping it authentic. It is a script font, but I added some stand alone capitals that you can use in all caps words and texts effortlessly, as the open type code is taking care of using the right set of letters at the right time, I could have made two separate fonts, but I wanted to give you the best value I could and ease of use. Make sure contextual alternates are always on! There are also swashes, alternate styles, stylistic sets, small caps, 2 figure sets and decorative elements, all accessible through open type. I think the font is particularly suited for display use, as in logos, packaging design, branding, but it is readable enough for small text blocks. You can access the non-linking caps by clicking on the discretionary ligatures button. You can access the loopy caps by clicking on the titling alternates button. The main version has straight terminals but I included a round version and a calligraphic one, called “classico”. Hope you like it!

This font was based on calligraphic letters I made with pen size 2B.

NerdishHex is a hexagonal distortion of NewNerdish that I thought was rather interesting.

Cider is based on a logo I made for a Finnish cider brand.

This one is just for fun. I named it after my cat, Gwendolyn.

I just finished book 8 of The Expanse (by James S.A. Corey) and the name Takeshi popped up somewhere, so I decided to use it for this font family! Takeshi is a hand made set of fonts: a fat display font, a thinner complementary font and a doodle font. Enjoy!

This font is artistic. The shape of the letters was taken from the dot art that I worked on consistently. Letters are read by habit and feeling. Sometimes I also think for a moment about what this letter is. But, you soon find out. A brief pause and continuation is refreshing.

A Public Secret (or Open Secret) is something that is widely known, although it is not supposed to be. Public Secret is a hand drawn font (I used a fineliner) that I made in between building a shower, a toilet and a laundry room… Yes, it’s all in a day’s work! ;-)

Udon Soupis my all time favourite Japanese food! I like it so much that I decided to name a font after it. Udon Soup font is a handmade script font, kind of messy, kind of weird, but very legible and useful. Comes with oodles of diacritics and double letter ligatures.

Chumpsy is clumsy - I did my best to make an awkward and bouncy hand-written font that was funky, but still legible. I added 11 slightly different versions of each lowercase letter, which automatically cycle as you type, or you can manually choose the one that suits you the best.

Looking for a fun new font? Look no further I have just what you've been waiting for. This new novelty font that I call Chinte is a bold fullcase font. This font comes with multiple languages and symbols. And had multiple uses: Branding, Logos, and many more of your projects.

Massimo is a semi-serif geometric type family. For as long as I can remember, I've admired the visual style of New York – its architecture, fashion, design, and typography. After spending two weeks in Manhattan this summer, I wanted to prepare a sharp and modern typeface in Big Apple style.

While it is obvious that this is an ornamental style font, it is more than that: it is a Celtic Knotwork design tool! Irish, Scottish, Welsh, even Norse and Viking cultures have used knotwork designs for millenia. These ancient traditional interwoven designs are experiencing a revival as Celtic culture gains exposure in the modern world. Intricate Celtic knots are featured everywhere from jewelry to tattoos. While many enjoy them simply for their beauty and fascinating twists, they can also be used to add an air of myth, magic and mystery to any project. The interlaced lines make them perfect for wedding invitations, borders, dividers and rules, web graphics, and logos. I began using Celtic knotwork designs in my own work as part of my knifemaking and jewelry making hobbies. I read all of the books I could find about Celtic knots and at first I drew them by hand with pencil and paper. Then as I realized how nice it would be to have "undos" I switched over to using Corel Draw. Draw proved to be a natural for this type of artwork with tools like contour and the trim function. But even with these great tools, it was still tedious to create these designs. I noticed that I was able to reuse a lot of parts in repetitive sections. I developed a small library of reusable bits and chunks of Celtic designs. I found them so useful and fun to work with that I began thinking about ways to market my Celtic design kit. I thought about CDR and EPS formats, but then I thought of creating this toolset as a True Type Font. That way anyone with ANY program that uses fonts could easily create Celtic knotwork designs. Word processors, embroidery programs, engraving programs, jewelry design programs, CAD/CAM programs...almost every program can use fonts. I was also interested in CNC work and thought that this font would work well for applications such as laser etching, vinyl signs, and machining. With that in mind, I designed each character of the font with extremes of accuracy. If one character from the font is used at one inch tall, every control point will be placed to an accuracy of better than 0.0001 inch. I wanted every piece to meet exactly with the next, with no possibility for misalignment. The different styles are all very carefully created to fit accurately with each other. So the Filled Style fits exactly into the Outline Style, and the Inverse Style fits precisely around the Outline Style so as to make up the background behind the knotwork. Combining the styles allows you to have complete creative control. By assembling the nearly 200 pieces it is quite easy to produce very complex designs. It is actually a bit like playing with a puzzle and many people really enjoy putting the pieces together to make designs. In fact, I have had many customers tell me of how they love playing with this font and making knots into the wee hours of morning. If you like puzzles then you will absolutely love this font! And creating the patterns is just the beginning of the fun! If you apply your favorite Photoshop tricks on them you can make anything from dazzling chrome knotwork to carved stone. Photoshop plug-ins like SuperBladePro are great for converting knotwork text into corroded bronze or rusted iron. Use your knotwork to add texture to a virtual landscape, or add them as surface embelishments on architecture and furniture. You can also make round knotwork by using this font with "WordArt" (WordArt is included with every copy of Microsoft Word. See http://clanbadge.com/round_knots.htm for a tutorial on how to make round knotwork). For Crafters there are limitless uses for this font. It has been used for embroidery, jewelry, leatherwork, stencils, stained glass, quilting, painting, pyrography, woodcarving and lots more. We have even sold copies to monks for use in decorating handmade books!

When I first saw the scrapbook pages of Danielle Paradis, I was immediately struck by the funky-cool distinction of her handwriting style. I was inspired and felt moved to ask her for samples, from which to build a complete font. This warm and friendly font is applicable to a wide variety of uses. Use it wherever a casual cool look is desired. It's right at home on trendy restaurant menus, children's publications, organic food labels, correspondence and of course, scrapbooks, to suggest a few. A number of stylistic alternates are included.

Ela Sans is the sister of the typeface I originally designed for the business of my second wife and mother of my two sons, her name is - of course - Michaela. Ela - the typeface - is suitable for magazines, newspapers, posters, advertiments, books, text, documentation/business reports, business correspondence, multimedia, and corporate design. Because lately this typeface became very popular I decided to extend the Ela Sans family to eight weights and I added italic and smallcaps versions to it. So now Ela Sans and Demiserif together is a full fledged typeface family.

ITC Musclehead is the work of type designer Timothy Donaldson, a robust, densely packed handwriting typeface. It almost looks like brushwork but was in fact made with a ruling pen which Donaldson had bought from a company in Salem, Massachusetts. He says, The world's gone ruling-pen mad at the moment [late 1990s] and I was beginning to tire of all the skinny splashiness of the letters that most people were making with them. I wanted to do something heavy and robust with the tool, so that's what I did.""

Street Tag vol1 is inspired from graffiti tag in urban areas in Jakarta, i also draw graffiti, tag and throw up since high school. This is originally my style, inspired from some my favourite graffiti artist, my tag style is not so tidy and i think you guys should adjust the kerning manually again, because it’s impossible to adjust them to be tidy. I also create special letter "G",“Y” and “T” in vector base, so you can edit the path as you like, combine with the original font, you can see the sample.

The Three Degrees had a song called 'Dirty Ol' Man'; Christina Aguilera danced around to the tune of 'Dirrrty' and my three kids leave everything that way after they have finished their meals, so I guess I really had no other option than to call this font: Dirrrty. Dirrrty is a brush font I painted in one go. It is quite dynamic, with some serious grunge in it. Dirrrty is all caps, but upper and lower case differ and can be interchanged. Comes with with a truly disgusting amount of diacritics.

Greyfriars Kirkyard is the graveyard surrounding Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, Scotland. I needed a rather ‘English’ name for this hand drawn Baskerville, but I ended up with a Scottish one. Greyfriars font was hand drawn with a Japanese brush pen. It is based on Baskerville, a font I really like. The glyphs are a bit rough and jumpy, which adds to Greyfriars’ unique look. Use it for your titling, book covers and product packaging, or stick it in a website and see what happens! Comes with a jolly bundle of diacritics.

I was listening to the radio and a song caught my attention. It was ‘Demagogue’ by a band called the Urban Dance Squad. That song brought back memories from when I was a student, so I decided to name this font after it. Demagogue was made using a Sharpie pen and a piece of expensive paper. The result is a very legible, very neat and very bold font. Demagogue is ideal for when you want to get your message across, but hopefully not in a demagogue-ish way! ;-)

Penang is a modern take on an old piece of Art Deco signage I had discovered in Penang Malaysia. The font is available in four styles: Regular, Bold and Italics of both. It looks great as All Caps but works equally well in standard copy. The font is loaded with plenty of extras and glyphs (256 but who is counting). I have various cuts of certain letters available as alternates to enhance whatever design you’re working on. I’m really happy with how this font finished, so I hope you enjoy using it.

Twirrewyn is Frisian for ‘Whirlwind’. I have always liked the Frisian language; it’s like a crossover between English and Dutch. When I studied journalism in Zwolle (a city close to Fryslân) there were a lot of Frisian students and I did pick up a few words! Twirrewyn is a handmade font family: the fat version was made using a brush and ink; the light version was made using that same ink, but with a broken satay skewer instead of a brush. And yes, you have guessed right, we eat a lot of Satay! ;-)

In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the tree of life, which grows right into heaven - maybe even space! It has deep roots, which grows into three different worlds. I made this font in hope that someone with a love to Norse mythology could use it - maybe even for something viking themed! I don’t think that the gods of Norse mythology ever heard of contextual alternates or multilingual support - but I added it, without even asking! - Yggdrasil has 5 different versions of each letter (in both Regular and Rough) and supports loads of different languages!

Hyggemand is not a real word: it is a combination of Hygge (meaning ‘fun’ or ‘coziness’ in Danish) and Mand (which means man in Danish). Combined it means something like ‘Nice Man’. I just like the sound and look of this name, so if I offend Danish languages purists, then I apologise for this monstrosity! ;-) Hyggemand is a happy kids font that comes with extensive language support and a set of alternates for the lower case glyphs. If you want the cute Huggeman face, you will find it as a stylistic alternate for the asterisk.

I was commissioned by the Emporium (now Macys) to digitize Radiant Bold Extra Condensed (originally designed by Robert Middleton in 1940) for use in their Sunday supplement to the San Francisco Examiner. For several years, I stubbornly refused to add the lowercase letters to the font, because I thought it looked best just used with caps, but finally relented, added the lowercase letters and at the same time created two more weights as well: Light and Medium. Used very large and carefully, these faces can be quite elegant.

When designing a font, I often imagine how I think it should be used or where I'd be likely to see it out in the real world. With Barataria I envisioned it on decorative, antique-looking signs hanging outside shops in the French Quarter of New Orleans - hence the name. Barataria is based on samples of 1920s period poster lettering. It's a bold, heavy roman font with strong, rounded character forms. Barataria also has some unique alternative character forms, like the super-looped 'g' shown in the sample.

Thomas Oldfield’s typeface, Reaper, is reminiscent of inscribed Greek letterforms but he claims that its origin is much simpler than that. “I recall”, Tom says, “that I just began the design by making the uppercase ‘I’ and continued using it to make up the other characters.” The cap only typeface has alternate cap forms in the lowercase positions, including a vastly scaled downed O and Q that make for some unusual text settings. Contrary to what the name might have you believe, there’s a lot of life in this quirky typeface.