The sheet music for the 1914 Word War I comic novelty song "When the War Breaks Out in Mexico I'm Going to Go to Montreal" had one of those overly-worded song titles popular during this period (13!), along with interesting sans serif hand lettering. It now debuts digitally as Conscription JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Stonetype is a typeface that was used by stonemasons in the 70s & 80s of the last century. When I was starting as a stonemason, these were the first characters I had to draw, by hand, back then on grave monuments and memorial plaques. The idea was born to digitize all the material, to be saved for eternity. By digitizing all and fine tuning, plus the addition of some main characters, Stonetype has now grown into a user-friendly typeface that can, now still, be used by stonemasons, to improve their creation process times. But Stonetype can also easily be used in modern and contemporary designs. Stonetype is the perfect fit for graphic design, editorial design, magazines, posters, logotypes, brands and corporate design. Stonetype is designed by Coert De Decker in 2019 and published by Kustomtype Font Foundry.

Diaconia Old Style is a new rendition of my workhorse body copy font that I originally designed to use for the body copy of "Printing in a Digital World." I became increasingly upset with the lack of lowercase numbers and true small caps. Diaconia started life as a modification of one of the Dutch Bible fonts I traced. It has changed a lot since then (although I have a hard time telling how much because I have lost the original). The plain and italic work especially well when used in very large sizes as display faces. The other four variants (small caps, heavy, heavy italic, and black) are designed for use in book production. Because I format all my own books, I was able to design fonts that met my needs exactly: lowercase numbers, SMALL CAPS font, Mac Command, Option, and Control symbols, ballot box in the section slot, and several other special characters. DiaconiaPro is the OpenType family of my body copy workhorse. This is the first font family I ever created: classic, elegant, easy to read. 583 characters: small caps, oldstyle figures, numerators, denominators, lining figures, accents and a lot more.

I present you Trečiokas typeface. This two font family is based on written letters that were sketched by using paint markers and afterwards pollished digitally. Glyphs mostly are connected, leaving some separate, as a contrast to round and soft letter shapes. It includes extended latin character set. In 2013 I made the Aerofont project, which included custom music instruments that were made based on Trečiokas Normal letter shapes. The main idea was to connect music and typography, by making sound emitting letters. You can watch the project video here.

In 2012 the city of Schwäbisch Gmünd will celebrated its 850th anniversary, and in 2014 it was host town to the State Garden Show of Baden-Württemberg. These both celebrations were the background to create a special font for my home town and give it the town’s ancient name. Inspired by Excoffon’s Diane, I drew and digitized a new, multilingual script font which covers the main European languages written in Latin or Cyrillic letters. For users typing in the Serbian language, I recommend to activate the OT feature Stylistic Alternatives.

Originally designed by American type designer Morris Fuller Benton in 1933, Agency Gothic is a wonderful, narrow, squarish art deco typeface. I was commissioned by Publish magazine to create digital versions of Agency Gothic Open and Agency Gothic Condensed for a redesign in 1990. Since then, I have added four other styles. Agency Gothic CT is uppercase only and supports most European languages that use the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. The Agency Gothic CT family is available in six weights/styles: Light, Medium, Bold, Condensed, Inline, and Open.

RensGazet is a decorative blackletter typeface with elaborate upper-case letters and condensed lower-case characters. It was inspired by the masthead of a short-lived weekly newspaper, The Rensselaer Gazette, which was published from 1857 until 1860. I could not find any existing digitized fonts that replicated this old typeface, so I decided to create an interpretation of it. I had samples of few letters in large point sizes and a number of others at a small point size, though these were blurry and not sharply defined. As a result, this typeface is undoubtedly considerably different from the original. Also, my spacing is much tighter than that in the source samples.

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.

Here's a creative font for your crafts, postcards, posters, book covers or perhaps your next birthday invitation! Thirsty Spine covers a lot of needs, where a crazy handmade look is needed. Each letter has 5 different versions, all with it's own charm. I did very little when digitizing this font, and that in order to keep the genuine pen strokes.

Metropolis Bold was commissioned by Publish magazine for their 1990 redesign. Although other digital versions exist, I think this was the first one and is characterized by extremely pointy serifs. It is well to remember in laying out copy for Metropolis to allow plenty of white space in the layout. Metropolis is based on the 1932 Stempel cut as designed by W. Schwerdtner.

I hate the idea of revivals. I have publicly said I choose not to do revivals because they make me uncomfortable. This is as close as I have been to crossing my own line. To be direct, Rhythm is based on the ATF typeface, Ratio (I just recently learned the foundry of origin). I came across this typeface from a printed specimen years ago when I was in school and held onto it. It was unique and I loved how well integrated the inline worked within both the flourish and serif of the glyphs—it was old, but not, reminiscent, but fresh. My specimen was limited in the glyph offering (it was c. 1930ish) and I realized a lot would need to be done to ‘finish’ it and bring it to contemporary expectations. I didn't want to do ‘retro’ and tried to avoid the visual trappings associated with it. What I did want to do is interpret what I had in the specimen and reinterpret it digitally, refining its construction and extending its typographic equity along the way. The ‘One’ and ‘Two’ (and their matching ‘Solids’) styles diverge providing various elaborations that coordinate well between rigid bracketed serifs and compact tails. I further expanded the glyph offering to include a full diacritic set, old style numerals, fractions, stylistic alternates, swashes, titling alternates and controlled flourishes that adhere to the efficient framework of the script. And yes, I refer to it as a ‘script’ because calling it a ‘cutesy serif’ seems wrong :) I hope this is seen less as a slavish revival and more as a championing of a really unique typeface. The Original Typeface was Adastra, designed by Herbert Thannhaeuser for the Foundry D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt, Germany.

I happened to mention to the proprietor of an antique barn near here that I'd be interested in any old typewriters she happened to come across. A conversation ensued, the proprietor withdrew into a back room, and she re-emerged with an old handwritten letter, dated 18 Sept. 1825 and spanning nearly three pages. The letter, penned by Samuel Clarke, a Princeton, Mass., pastor, sought donations for the victims of an accident at sea. I thought his script unique, stylistic, and definitely something worth digitizing, so I bought the old letter and took it home. Had to come up with several uppercase characters to round out the set, but the results seem good and proper. Full release has complete character set.

These are the letters I doodled in the margins of my high school notebooks. As it turns out, a man named Milt Glaser doodled them first. He doodled a lot of other amazing things too. Mr. Glaser called his blocky alphabet Baby Teeth. I think the type looks better when it says Surfside, so that's what I called my incarnation. This version has been digitized and expanded, and is available for Mac and PC. These letters remind me of the 80s and the 90s, of Gotcha shorts, Ocean Pacific shirts and fluorescent windbreakers. Surfside matched my Airwalks. They're big and bold. Clunky and funky. Spices up words. Makes 'em look great! Surfside is cool and available for a low low price... scoop it up today!

While helping produce a trade magazine years ago, I admired the hand-lettering of the art director -- a woman named Marydale -- and suggested she let me model a font after her penmanship. She agreed and drew out the alphabet, and I launched an old copy of Fontographer and (to shorten a long story) ended up developing my very first digital typeface. Which has since, astonishingly, become famous worldwide. So now the real Marydale gets the mixed blessing of seeing her handwriting (and name) plastered all over the planet. Full release has regular, bold, and black weights.

Here’s another font family for your hand lettering projects. Hop Serif Hand Lettering is a font family consisting of 3 styles: 1.) Hop Serif Hand Lettering Regular 2.) Hop Serif Hand Lettering Lines 3.) Hop Serif Hand Lettering Shadow This font family is all authentically hand drawn from pencil and paper to the digital screen and is perfect to include on designs for apparel such as mugs, t-shirts, bags, notebooks, inspirational quotes for the home and office, and more. Each font is multi-lingual too! I love using this font in my hand lettering designs and I hope you will too!

Impulsa is a very impulsive handwritten font. It is finished with digital touch but still keep holding on to the honest of the handwriting feeling. I believe messages with personalized handwriting vibes always deliver deeper feelings to anybody. Impulsa is an all-caps font. You can play with the uppercase and lowercase mix to get the different vibes of every letters so it looks seamlessly handwritten.

Sheet music from 1910 with another one of those ridiculous thirteen word titles (“I Love My Steady but I’m Crazy for My “Once-in-a-While’”) had the lengthy verbiage hand lettered in a bold serif typeface with slightly spurred serifs. This has been recreated in a digital typeface with a much shorter name: Weekend Date JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Arventa was designed to be highly legible and flexible. Arventa offers a high quality alternative to contemporary humanist sans serifs and is a flexible family for editorials and corporate branding. Arventa comes in seven weights (ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black and UltraBlack). I wanted to create a very refined family that could be used for display or body copy, for print or digital.

Satin Blues is my easy going and very legible sans. Actually I drew this by hand and then traced each letter digitally, leaving a super steady, yet funky, comic font. I've made two versions: the Regular and Soft. The Soft version has rounded edges, which gives a smoother look. The font is very suitable for anything that needs a clear but wild comic look.

The idea for Gilman started simple enough, a serif typeface that works well for large amounts of text. However, after many struggles creating a quality typeface digitally, I decided to first draw the complete alphabet by hand on paper, and then trace that digitally. The result is a unique workhorse typeface with a subtle “human touch” that is very rare in this modern technological age. Gilman has extensive language support and comes with many opentype features like true small caps, tabular lining figures, stylistic alternates, ligatures and more. Gilman Sans (derived from the serif) is an excellent compliment and works together harmoniously with Gilman on the page.

For many years I had repeatedly written names on certificates or designed texts for certificates of honor with a pen. I later digitized a font written with a broad pen from 1988 to make it easier to use. After the technical possibilities for this had developed, I made a PostScript font out of this document font. The "HGB-Unik" is a humanistic antiqua that arose from this written type. In 2009 Unik was chosen as the text font for a book. However, the book designers wanted to have an italic and a bold style as well. The cursive was developed from written texts that I also wrote for various occasions in the 1980s. The resulting font family was thoroughly revised several times until a usable text font with four weights was created. Although the Unik looks very idiosyncratic in display size, it shows a surprisingly balanced, pleasant typeface in read size.

When I released Halogen, I asked ‘Who doesn't want or need an expansive contemporary extended sans that has a sense of style and swagger… what if it had a lowercase, small caps and various numeral options… how could you say no?’ Go, click on the Halogen link and read on, if you're interested. Halogen was well-received, so I decided to take it further with Halogen Flare (the name kinda tips you off as to what kind of typeface it is, don't ya think?). As always, I prefer not to take short cuts and provide an anemic offering of glyphs — a modern typeface offered today must provide more than just the basics and this one does — lowercase, smallcaps, old style numerals, tabular forms, stylistic and titling alternates, fractions, case-sensitive features, and even an alternate uppercase ordinal set is included. Now, go make cool print and digital things with it.

This all started with a love for Minister. This is a font designed by Carl Albert Fahrenwaldt in 1929. In the specimen booklet there’s a scan from Linotype’s page many years ago. They no longer carry the font. I’ve gone quite a ways from the original. It was dark and a bit heavy. But I loved the look and the readability. This came to a head when I started my first book on all-digital printing written from 1994-1995, and published early in 1996. I needed fonts to show the typography I was talking about. At that point oldstyle figures, true small caps, and discretionary ligatures were rare. More than that text fonts for book design had lining OR oldstyle figures, lowercase OR small caps—never both. So, I designed the Diaconia family (using the Greek word for minister). It was fairly rough. I knew very little. I later redesigned and updated Diaconia into Bergsland Pro —released in 2004. It was still rough (though I impressed myself). In 2006, I found myself needing a readable sans serif. So I went to Bergsland Pro, and eliminated the serifs. I named the font Brinar. I kept a flare in place for the serifs and cupped the ends. I was stunned. People loved it. It’s remained my bestseller until very recently. So, at the end of 2016 I decided that Brinar really needed some help. The flares were basically random. The stem width and modulation variances all needed to be fixed. My old OpenType feature code was quite limited and clumsy. So, I created the 6-font Biblia family. I cleaned up or redesigned all the glyphs. I updated the fonts to the 2017 set of features: small caps, small cap figures, oldstyle figures, fractions, lining figures, ligatures and discretionary ligatures. These are fonts designed for book production and work well for text or heads.

Varietta is the result of my fascination with photographing the type designs of some marquees in Spanish markets. In them you can see many letter designs with reversed contrast and in different widths, probably based on the possibilities of photocomposition. At the same time I was working on the expansion of the Hastile typeface designed by Alessandro Butti for the Nebiolo foundry in Italy in the late 1930s, of which I had not seen any digitization. As I am not a fan of perfect revivals, I thought it could be interesting to connect Spain and Italy in a single typeface. The first step was to expand Butti's design to 27 styles, ranging from thin condensed to black expanded. To look for the Spanish connection and its characteristic inverse contrast I took advantage of the current technology that allows variable typefaces with many axes. From this, three scenarios of horizontal contrast were incorporated (top, bottom and mixed) which allows infinite possibilities of use. The final result is a collection of 108 static typefaces or a single variable file.

The Rocaie fonts are base on antique Rococo letters from an gilding workshop. I was very lucky to acquire this set of metal letters in early 2018. Each of the letters has ornaments engraved by hand into its cast brass shapes. When drawing the digital outlines, I tried to preserve the handmade look of the original leaf engravings. Each of the letters uses a slightly different ornament pattern: no pattern is repeated identically. I expanded the very limited character set of the original, adding all the missing characters that today’s commercial fonts are expected to contain. I made additional font styles to easily add colour layers, outlines, and 3D shadows to the typeface. It’s up to you to decide how to “build” your colour font! You can combine the predefined font styles Regular, Pearl, Solid, Outline, and Magnum with each other, or with the Fill font styles. But you don't need to use all font styles to compose something nice! Have as much fun as I did with this Baroque beauty and enjoy the vintage.

After release of Wood Bonnet Antique No.7 some of my clients asked for a sans serif version. So I printed my second batch of old wood type. I transferred these wood type into a digital font and tried to preserve the warm vintage look. » pdf specimen « The font offers up to four glyph variations of all the Latin base letters, figures and some additional letters - It has an build in letter randomizer. Please check you have turned on contextual alternates in your application. If you prefer a more common look and need more weights or to use the font in smaller text sizes I have done clean and sharp font family called Bonnet Grotesque Nr. It’s the preferred version for all the usages on websites, apps or ebooks. Have fun!

ITC Cyberkugel is the work of British designer Timothy Donaldson, who occasionally likes to write with an extra-fine ballpoint pen. I like the spindly scrawny forms that it gives me when I follow all the usual 'italic' writing conventions", he says. And there lie the origins of ITC Cyberkugel, although the creative process was moved from pen and paper to software and a Wacom tablet. "I like the fact that people will be buying it to give them a 'human', 'organic', 'non-digital' look, and yet no ink has soiled paper. Although the movements of the hand are still the essence, the whole thing was created in cyberspace." The name comes from combining cyberspace and Kugelschreiber, the German word for ballpoint pen. ITC Cyberkugel is a fresh interpretation of traditional calligraphy."

Architype Crouwel is a collection of typefaces created in collaboration with Wim Crouwel, following his agreement with The Foundry, to recreate his experimental alphabets as digital fonts. Crouwel's most recognized work was for the Van Abbe and Stedelijk museums (1954 –72) where he established his reputation for radical, grid-based design. Architype Catalogue’s soft ‘padded’ letterforms were originally created by Wim Crouwel for the Stedelijk museum’s 1970 exhibition of sculptor Claes Oldenburg.. Crouwel said, ‘When you look at Oldenburg’s work, with all those soft objects, it gets into your system, so you try to integrate that feeling in the design. Claes was very taken with the catalogue's typeface, and asked me if I would do the whole alphabet for him, so I did. I cut it all out in pink paper and pasted it together’.

This all started with a love for Minister. This is a font designed by Carl Albert Fahrenwaldt in 1929. In the specimen booklet there’s a scan from Linotype’s page many years ago. They no longer carry the font. I’ve gone quite a ways from the original. It was dark and a bit heavy. But I loved the look and the readability. This came to a head when I started my first book on all-digital printing written from 1994-1995, and published early in 1996. I needed fonts to show the typography I was talking about. At that point oldstyle figures, true small caps, and discretionary ligatures were rare. More than that text fonts for book design had lining OR oldstyle figures, lowercase OR small caps—never both. So, I designed the Diaconia family using the Greek word for minister. It was fairly rough. I knew very little. I later redesigned and updated Diaconia into Bergsland Pro—released in 2004. It was still rough (though I impressed myself). Now, with 4-font Biblia Serif family 13 years later, I’ve cleaned up, made the fonts more consistent internally, added more functional OpenType features, and brought the fonts into the 21st century. I used the 2017 set of features: small caps, small cap figures, oldstyle figures, fractions, lining figures, ligatures and discretionary ligatures. These are fonts designed for book production and work well for text or heads. Finally, in 2021, I went over the fonts entirely and remade them in Glyphs.

My brother is an architect, and I have always loved his lettering, you know, the style of writing that can be found on architectural drawings. There is a common thread to it, yet each architect or engineer brings their own personality to it. I have seen a similar style being used by some hand-letterers for invitations, place cards and signage. Inspired, I set out to create my own, and the result is my new typeface, Robard! I wanted something compact, somewhat modular, done quickly but with control, and sourced from hand-lettering. Starting out with a handful of pigment ink pens, I settled on a 0.1mm Copic Multi-Liner, and using a light table with a grid underneath the paper, I cranked out grouping after grouping, letter after letter, numbers, punctuation, accents, just trying to zero in on the feeling and the look I was after. There were some ideas that didn't work, like unicase (there would be no regular lowercase), or swash alternates. Ultimately, I ended up with a decent array of glyphs to choose from, and alternates like oldstyle numbers, and an alternate set of caps for the lowercase slots, and even alternative figures so doubles like 88 would be different. In the font, the OpenType ligature code automatically alternates the cap and lowercase (alternate cap) letters, and numbers as you type, lending Robard that hand-lettered look in a digital typeface that I was hoping for. There are also oldstyle figures, and unlimited fractions, ordinals, and a few alternate letters. I hope you like Robard!

When I released Halogen, I asked ‘Who doesn't want or need an expansive contemporary extended sans that has a sense of style and swagger… what if it had a lowercase, small caps and various numeral options… how could you say no?’ Go, click on the Halogen link and read on, if you're interested. Halogen was well-received, so I decided to take it further with Halogen Slab (the name kinda tips you off as to what kind of typeface it is, don't ya think?). As always, I prefer not to take short cuts and provide an anemic offering of glyphs — a modern typeface offered today must provide more than just the basics and this one does — lowercase, smallcaps, old style numerals, tabular forms, stylistic and titling alternates, fractions, case-sensitive features, and even an alternate uppercase ordinal set is included. Now go make cool print and digital things with it, and share them with me.

Many years ago I studied American Sign Language in an effort to better communicate with some friends of mine within the deaf community. I found ASL to be a beautifully expressive language from a vibrant and active culture. Out of that attempt came this stylized depiction of the manual alphabet used in finger-spelling. Until recently it had only existed in analog form, born of pen and ink on paper. So now I'm glad to say it’s turned digital. Typing a period (.) will reveal the sign for “I Love You” (a combination of the letters I, L and Y), which fits nicely within the shape of a heart. Holding down the shift key while again typing period (greater symbol) will reveal the heart in its filled-in form, which can serve as an underlay. Use these in an application that supports layering in order to create different color combinations. There’s a stylistic alternate letter “S” and an “OO” ligature which can be accessed in OpenType-savvy apps.

Obcecada Sans & Serif are two geometric digital typefaces in regular and bold versions, very condensed and thin with a rounded finish on the horns and joints with a modern style. They include the Cyrillic and Greek alphabet. These fonts are the result of my obstinacy for very condensed fonts, in this case I have inclined to a very fine proportion with short ascending and descending that gives them elegance decó.

Funkadelity is a funky breed between 60ies poster typography and 80ies grafitti. Maybe even inspired a bit by comic book lettering! Funkadelity wants to burn off the dance floor and show off the fancy dance moves - at the same time, it want to show off the smooth and clean lines of the letters. Originally handdrawn, but I digitally remastered every single letter, leaving the curves smooth and clean!

Max J. Gradl was a German jewelry designer. A Web search today turns up several examples of his work from the turn of the 20th century. He seemed to favor green stones in silver metalwork. Gradl also did advertising work and co-authored a book on architectural design. Most important for our purposes, though, are the incredible hand lettered alphabets and monograms the man left behind. I’ve digitized one of those delightful alphabets and tried to keep it true to the original. Beyond the base character set of letters, numerals and basic punctuation, I had to extrapolate forms that, I hope, hold true to Gradl’s design. Enjoy!

Gilman Sans is the family member of Gilman, the serif that it was derived from. The idea for Gilman started simple enough, a serif typeface that works well for large amounts of text. However, after many struggles creating a quality typeface digitally, I decided to first draw the complete alphabet by hand on paper, and then trace that digitally. The result is a unique workhorse typeface with a subtle “human touch” that is very rare in this modern technological age. Gilman Sans has extensive language support and comes with many opentype features like true small caps, tabular lining figures, stylistic alternates, ligatures and more. Gilman Sans and Gilman are excellent compliments and work together harmoniously on the page.