Here's another collection of ornate border elements gleaned from the 1888 specimen books of James Conner's Sons United States Type Foundry in New York City. Refer to the PDF guide for detailed, yet simple, instructions for constructing nine delightfully different border patterns.

This font can be used as a play'n learn tool to teach the meaning of these modern day communication symbols. Each alphabetical character can be printed with or without the corresponding roman symbols. NOTE: comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

This font can be used as a play'n learn tool to teach the meaning of these modern day communication symbols. Each alphabetical character can be printed with or without the corresponding roman symbols. NOTE: comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

This font can be used as a play'n learn tool to teach the meaning of these modern day communication symbols. Each alphabetical character can be printed with or without the corresponding roman symbols. NOTE: comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

Axionhero is an experiment which include a simple grid built font. I took the font, and smashed it into grunge letters. Believe me, it works very well - maybe that's because the font has got almost 400 different ligatures! You will need to use OpenType supporting applications to use the autoligatures.

This font is based on an alphabet published by Luca Pacioli in his 1509 mathematical treatise De divina proportione. In this book, Pacioli describes how to build the Roman alphabet geometrically using lines, squares and circles. Pacioli was not the first or the last man in his era to describe the building of letters mathematically. Felice Feliciano did this before Pacioli, and Albrecht Dürer further developed these forms years after. According to Pacioli, the thick strokes should be 1/9th of the height, and the thin strokes should have 1/2 the weight of the thick strokes. I felt that this beautiful alphabet needed to be restored to its full geometric glory and set out to construct an accurate replica using Pacioli's instructions. Included in the font you'll find the letters that have the grid overlay and also the letters without the grid. The letters J, W, U, and Z were not included in the book, so I have created my own versions of these characters that fit into Pacioli's grid. Pacioli shows two different Os in the book, so I have included the second O as well as a second J, Q, and Z as OpenType stylistic alternates. Also included in the font are border patterns and a fleuron taken from the cover of the book.

Here’s a collection of border elements taken from the pages of nineteenth and early twentieth century type specimen books of various American foundries. Download the PDF provided for each font for simple guides to constructing various borders. All characters have identical widths, so use spaces between left and right-side elements. For best results, set solid (no extra leading) and use flush left, flush right or center justification to assure proper alignment.

This is the kind of letters I drew in school back in the 1980ies. I would never have guessed that I would do the same thing like 40 years later! I remember making a simple space game for my VIC-20 computer, and I needed some "data letters" (as I called it) - as far as I can remember, this is close to what I made 40-like years ago. Also, I was inspired by the well known series "Stranger Things" - you know, all that 80ies theme stuff took me down memory lane! :) Anyway, all the letters are handdrawn, using a squared paper as guide - at it may look simple, but it took me quite some time to finish this font (hence the name!)

A hand lettered emulation of a Roman stencil type face on the cover of the folio for the Stenso School Set was the basis for Eutaw Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. The Stenso School Set (circa 1940-41) was comprised of three stencils – two lettering guides and a map of the [then] 48 United States. Developed and patented by Baltimore school teacher Ruth Libauer Hormats, her stencils were the first to offer a system for accurate letter spacing and ease of use. “Eutaw” (as part of the font’s name) is taken from Eutaw Place, the street where Ruth and her husband lived at the time of Stenso’s inception. To the Cherokee, the name means “Creek Indian”.

An online image of a grid page [circa 1930s] showing teachers how they and their students could create cut-out letters and numbers inspired Poster Project JNL. The typeface is available in both regular and oblique versions. A crude, yet charming simplicity to the lettering can help replicate old time school bulletin boards and posters, or simply provide a less formal typographic approach when that is needed for a project.

Here’s a workman-like collection of border elements gleaned from the specimen books of various American manufacturers of woodtype from around 1840 to 1885. Refer to the PDF guides for detailed, yet simple, instructions for constructing various border patterns, all with Victorian grace and charm.

Here's a handy-dandy collection of border elements gleaned from the specimen books of various manufacturers of woodtype from around 1840 to 1885. Refer to the PDF guide for detailed, yet simple, instructions for constructing sixteen different border patterns, all with Victorian grace and charm.

There are three XKnightMares fonts. Each has rather formal chess fonts. The key layout is a bit complicated; see the key guide for detailed information on how to position pieces correctly. In addition to making chess boards, some of the pieces make interesting decorations.

Here's a collection of Art-Noueveau-era border elements, gleaned from the pages of various German type foundry catalogs from the first decade of the twentieth century. Refer to the accompanying PDF guide for instructions on constructing twelve different, distinctive and elegant border sets.

Roman-style stencil fonts have been around for much longer than most people realize - from the interlocking brass stencils of the 1880s to the laser-cut plastic stencils of today. A 1 inch Roman lettering guide [die-cut from oil board with spacing holes for correct alignment] made by the now-defunct Zipatone Corporation in the 1970s was a clone of an existing design of another company; but with variations in certain character shapes. This then became the working model for Classroom Stencil JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Madley is a contemporary slab serif typeface. Featuring monolinear stems, elongated block serifs and teardrop terminals, the type family goes from a delicate Hairline weight to a heavy Black weight. Because of its range in weights and extensive Opentype features, it’s a perfect font for both text and display text settings. Alternative features include a wide array of swashes assigned up to 11 for select characters, combining ligatures in capital unicase settings, and stylistic alternates for some letters. To see more, please check out the User Guide and Specimen booklet.

Make an impact with geometric cubes! The Cubista Geometrica typeface is a monospaced design created to form repeated patterns, either individually (single symbol) or mix and matched with partner charaters. Each image is accessed through the standard keyboard—instead of letters, you'll get an image or glyph. This monospaced typeface is designed proportionately high as it it wide making it easy to form multi-line patchworks. The combination possibilities are enormous—this font comes with a PDF guide showing many of the assembly options, the rest we leave to your own imagination!

Contains over 130 symbols based on the Western astrology system - it features the 12 zodiac signs, the 12 astrology symbols, the 12 corresponding planets, along with the 30 phases of the moon and charting signs. NOTE: this font comes with an interpretation guide in pdf format.

Pexico is a pixel typeface that uses 10 by 14 grid (capital letter) in 8 styles: 4 basic styles for text setting — Regular, Bold, Narrow, and Mono and 4 stylistic variations of the Regular style for display setting — Outline, Dots, Round, and Inverse. It fits the display's pixel grid when used at 20pt size or its multiples. Pexico supports Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek Monotonic scripts, all with thoroughly designed diacritics. Moreover, Pexico makes use of advanced OpenType features, just as any other modern text typeface. Each style also has 9 sets of numbers, small capitals and is properly kerned. For more information go to Urtd.

Draughtwork is a special decorative font designed to have the look of a work in progress, showing the process of constructing letters using a ruler and a compass on a grid. It's in the tradition of our very popular Roughwork font, but more detailed and with additional features. Unlike Roughwork, Draughtwork includes a full upper and lower case character set plus some special alternate character variants. Developing Draughtwork was a monstrous task. The complexity of the 9x9 grids with each character were a challenge to the rendering capacity of Fontographer and required an extraordinary amount of fine tuning - but the result was worth the effort.

Amber is a minimal font which is built on a grid of 3x3 squares. It was an experiment to see if I could build legible glyphs out of such a small grid. The 3 weights can be layered over each other to create interesting designs.

Vernox is a geometric sans serif font inspired by Swiss design. You can completely align the grid to a grid. It is intended for small pieces of text such as titles and qoutes. Vernox comes with 2 weights. It makes perfect for all creative projects.

Kampen is a minimal, modular, monospaced font. There are two variants, each available in two styles. The two variants — Block and Pixel — differ considerably in look, however the characters in both are designed using the same 7 x 7 square grid for capital letters, with extra squares above and below for accented characters and lower case descenders.

Plastic Display JNL was sketched from photo examples in an old sales promotion sheet for the Movitex Do-It-Yourself Plastic Sign Kit. The set was manufactured by Pryor Marking Products of Chicago, and featured a board with pre-spaced holes in a grid to which the letters and numbers would be inserted to form the sign.

Mix Stitch, is an embroidery lesson disguised as a font, fit for handmade and DIY themed projects. Can be used to emulate embroidery in images, or as a guide to teach kids how to write. So many uses for this fun font, I don't even know where to begin.

I used to be a tour guide and I traveled to China numerous times. Usually, the itinerary mentioned going to a restaurant in Beijing and eating ‘Beijing Roast Duck’ (北京烤鸭), a famous dish that has been prepared since the Imperial era. Typically, the whole duck is sliced at your table. The skin is crisp, glazed and thin and you should eat it with thin pancakes and thinly sliced spring onion. Of course, if I had to guide several ‘China tours’ in a row, I would often eat something else (there is only so much Beijing Duck you can eat). Peking Duck is a nice, handmade, Chinese Ink font. Use it for your restaurant menu, your book covers or your posters, advertising oriental food!

Tetsuo is a geometric, gridded and monospaced typeface exhibiting a futuristic simplicity.

First published in 1938, Letters and Lettering by Paul Carlyle and Guy Loring was a textbook on lettering examples and how to do them. On one of the pages was found a solid black (counterless) Art Deco sans serif design that in its many variations so typified the era. The example shown in that book served as the model for Postmodern Moderne JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions.

ALUVEMSKREW is a fairly simple Blackletter font, not too many strokes or ornaments. The font is clean enough so that it has better legibility than other Blackletters. Even so, this font still has a vintage style so it is suitable for creating classic or retro designs, such as for liquor branding, studio tattoos or classic motorcycles. To enable the OpenType Stylistic alternates, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Indesign & CorelDraw X6-X7. Guides to access all alternates glyphs : http://adobe.ly/1m1fn4Y Cheers!

Poly is a serif typeface inspired by vintage travel guides keeping the naïf style typical of those publications. It has spiky serifs and a retro style. It will shine in headlines and packaging, for example, but it’s versatile. It can bring a lot of personality to brands and warmth to communication.

Foundry Dit is created with a common horizontal dash grid structure for accurate layering when characters are superimposed. Foundry Dit functions as a legible correspondence font, with a ‘typewriter’ feel. Foundry Dit’s companion family Foundry Dat has an integrated background grid. Each family contains: light, regular, medium and bold weights. Foundry Dat comes with a series of dashes to extend the grid. Characters can also be offset to make different patterns – in the process becoming images – a graphic language with total integration of form and function.

I used to be a tour guide and spent a lot of time in Asia. One thing that I really liked, was having noodles, ANY kind of noodles, for breakfast! Breakfast Noodles is a very uncomplicated headline font: I made it while seriously renovating our ‘new’ home (a fixer upper farm), which means that this particular font was made over a period of almost 3 months… It wasn’t exactly a letter at a time, but close. I will try and make the next font in, say, under two months… Hopefully! In the meantime, enjoy this one!

HELLSCOURT is a display font intended for horror themes such as halloween events, horror movies and other horror events. With a rough style, adding to this font is even more scary, because technically it is digital hand lettering, so it adds to the impression that this font is handcrafted and the vector process does not refine the rough parts so that it still has a rough impression. To enable the OpenType Stylistic alternates, you need a program that supports OpenType features such as Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Indesign & CorelDraw X6-X7. Guides to access all alternates glyphs : http://adobe.ly/1m1fn4Y Cheers!

Naming this typeface Troika, the Russian word meaning "group of three", seemed apt because the starting point in this design process was a three sided letter 'O'. This triangular type styling became a template guide for the rest of the character set. Troika is a highly distinctive, ultra modern typeface with idiosyncratic letterforms that make for striking headlines, particularly at large display sizes. Challenging, futuristic and experimental, always unique, and with caps as characterful as the lower case. Troika being derived from the French 'Triangle' and the Latin 'Triangulus' it seemed only fitting to design three weights: Light, Medium & Bold.

Romantic, decorative Adios Script is one of Alejandro Paul’s most elaborate and technically refined faces to date. Inspired by designs in “how-to” commercial lettering guides of the 1940s, it has been refined and brought into the 21st century through a huge variety of ornate swash letterforms. The lowercase “h” alone offers 43 variants. Hundreds of ornamental ascenders and descenders allow a beautiful interplay of strokes and combinations, while avoiding overlaps or conflicts. Adios Script features a mind-boggling 1,470 characters in total, in OpenType format. Adios Script received a Certificate of Excellence from the Type Directors Club.

The concept of a bold connected script with a hand lettered feel has been on my bucket list for decades. I imagined a pretentious, ornate, swashy look, a variety of word-end embellishments, heaps of ligatures and underscores. It took a weekend workshop on Python Scripting at Type@Cooper in San Francisco reinforcing the smarts of Opentype to make it happen. Hand drawn on paper using broad pen strokes for reference, the design was the easy part. The real work was in the back-end and self-imposed rigorous testing. Download a comprehensive pdf User Guide at this link.

Pexico Micro is a pixel typeface that uses 5 by 7 grid (capital letter) in 8 styles: 4 basic styles for text setting — Regular, Bold, Narrow, and Mono and 4 stylistic variations of the Regular style for display setting — Outline, Dots, Round, and Inverse. It fits the display's pixel grid when used at 10pt size or its multiples. Pexico Micro supports Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek Monotonic scripts, all with thoroughly designed diacritics. Moreover, Pexico Micro makes use of advanced OpenType features, just as any other modern text typeface. Each style also has 9 sets of numbers, small capitals and is properly kerned. For more information go to For more information go to Urtd.

A type designed in a grid, like on display panels Type is not only printed. There were always and still are a number of forms of type versions which function completely differently. Even very early in the history of script there were attempts to combine a few single elements into the diverse forms of individual characters and also efforts to construct the forms of letters within a geometric grid system. The “instructions” of Albrecht Dürer are probably most well-known. But although designers of past centuries assumed the ideal to basically be an artist’s handwritten script, the idea which developed in the course of mechanization was to “build” characters in a building block system only by stringing together one basic element — the so-called grid type was discovered, represented most commonly today by »pixel types.« But even before computers, there were display systems which presented types with the help of a mechanical grid display, like the display panels in public transportation (bus, train) or at airports and train stations. In a streetcar, I met up with a modern variation of this display which reveals the name of each tram stop as it is approached. This system was based on a customary coarse square grid, but the individual squares were also divided again diagonally in four triangles. In this way it is possible to display slants and to simulate round forms more accurately as with only squares. The displayed characters still aren’t comparable to a decent typeface — on the contrary, the lower case letters are surprisingly ugly — but they form a much more legible type than that of ordinary [quadrate] grid types. DeDisplay from ingoFonts is this kind of type, constructed from tiny triangles which are in turn grouped in small squares. The stem widths are formed by two squares; the height of upper case characters is 10, the x-height 7 squares. DeDisplay is available in three versions: DeDisplay 1 is the complex original with spaces between the triangles, DeDisplay 2 forgoes dividing the triangles and thus appears somewhat darker or “bold,” and DeDisplay 3 is to some extent the “black” and doesn’t even include spaces between the individual squares.

Grandis ("chainlink") was initially intended for a first person shooter’s UI, so this guided the design. The font had to be readable while maintaining sci-fi feel and also to not rely on kerning (most video games don’t support it). This meant a large x-height, steep diagonals and squared bowls to reduce the amount of white space between letters. Tabular numbers as default facilitate UI design where timers or tables are involved. What makes the font stand out from similar grotesks is the letters’ classical proportions with wide bowls and narrow rectangles. The result is a readable, versatile workhorse with an interesting dynamic rhythm and where extreme weights/widths can also be used for display purposes. Supports multilingual Latin and Cyrillic, including Bulgarian and Serbian alternates.