A poster circa 1930s-40s designed for the WPA Federal Art Project promoted free band concerts at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York. Its headline (“Free Band Concerts”) was hand lettered in a dual line Art Deco sans serif design. Now recreated digitally, the font takes its name after the poster’s topic. Band Concert JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

Here’s a futuristic face with a neo-retro twist, based on the logotype for the 1990s tank-warfare videogame for the Mac, Spectre. Whether you're going back to the future or resurrecting a blast from the past, this face will get you there in style. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets.

The sheet music for the title song of the 1960 movie "Exodus" had the name hand lettered in a block stencil style with rounded corners and narrow "rails" [the breaks between the stencil parts]. Loosely based on this design and working from just the six letters of the title, Cartage Stencil JNL is available as a digital font in both regular and oblique versions.

One of countless variations possible from the modular lettering system called "Super Veloz", developed by Spanish type designer Joan Trouchut-Blanchard in the 1930s. The name is a play on the old G.I. acronymn FUBAR, translated politely as "fouled up beyond all recognition". Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

Lodestone is a sans serif decorative typeface, and was created by Steve Jackaman (ITF) in 2017. The original design was known as ‘Marvin,’ and was created by Face Photosetting (London) in the early 1970’s. Since the name ‘Marvin’ was in use by another foundry at time of publication, ‘Lodestone’ was born. Lodestone has a clean, retro feel, and is electrifying at display sizes.

A little ditty from France circa the 1940s called "J'ai Rêvé Dans Tes Bras" (which loosely translated means "I've Dreamed in Your Arms") offered up its title hand lettered in an interesting Art Deco sans. This formed the basis for French Pastry JNL, a tasty typographical tidbit further preserving the wide choice of lettering styles hand-crafted for popular sheet music of past decades.

The Kaktis collection features eleven typefaces that have spikes or spines. Some have short spikes, some long, some sparse spines and others abundant spikes. They are novelty fonts with limited uses, but there can be times when a typeface of this sort may be appropriate, perhaps for a sharp rebuke or a pointed reminder. These faces were constructed in the mid 1990s using a font distortion program.

Liturgisch was created by Otto Hupp for Klingspor foundry in 1906. The basis of this font is a publication in the magazine "Das Plakat" of October 1921. The font contains contextual alternates, ligatures, discretional ligatures for use in German, ornamental bullets and other OpenType features. It supports all the European languages using Latin alphabets (including slashed S and slashed longs used in Latvian old orthography till 1930s).

Gelateria is characterized by its dots and tails. This font is as a whole smooth and elegant. But because its dots and end of the tails are little points, Gelateria impressed you very much. Holiday Type Project offers retro hand drawing scripts. Inspired by retro script on shopfront lettering, wall paint advertisements in Italy around 1950s. Check out the script fonts from Holiday Type!

This bouncy beauty was inspired by Walnetto Casual, designed by Dave West for Photo-Lettering, Inc. in the 1970s, and takes its name from a mythical West Texas beastie. This version has been thoughtfully designed to use Contextual Alternates to avoid unsightly serif collisions for best possible visual effect. Both versions of this font include the complete Latin 1252 and Central European 1250 character sets.

Goudy Type was designed by Frederic Goudy for ATF in 1916. He endeavored to create a lively design with some brush-lettering qualities. In his words, he believed he was still attempting to ‘find himself’ as a designer. Thirty years later he was shown the design and could hardly recollect its creation. Steve Matteson has digitized Goudy Type to preserve its place in typographic history.

A 1920 Dutch poster for Public Placement Services by Johan Dijsktra provided the inspiration for this crisp geometric typeface. Instead of the normal underscore (_), this font features a set of parallel lines flush to the tops of the caps and small caps, which offers some intriguing design possibilities. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets.

Because of the need for a new condensed serif font family, Jack Yan created this individualistic style of typefaces complete with one of the largest collections of unusual ligatures available at the time of launch in the mid-1990s. As well as the usual selection of double-f and ct, JY&A has provided gr, gt, ty, and other ligatures for JY Integrity Roman and Italic.

Pochoir is a sweet stencil antiqua typeface with round and thick serifs. Once, on a university trip to Paris, Yanone saw some spray-stencil street art. This inspired him to redraw Underware’s Dolly (with permission) in a spray-stencil style, making many adjustments to weight and character shapes to bring about Pochoir. The art form of stencils have first appeared in Paris in the 1980s.

Browsing online auctions and other webs sites often unearths wonderful examples of lettering from the past. A perfect example is Ritz Stencil JNL, modeled after a page from a 1930s-era lettering book. Although this font has similar characteristics to other better-known designs, there are enough unique differences to let it stand on its own as a great example of the Art Deco era.

Slatterine is a retro-futuristic family, inspired by the second streamline era of the 1950s It's ideal for any design work that needs to suggest bygone visions of the future, or to have a retro-space-age effect. Slatterine's horizontally shaded glyphs give a strong sense of motion, whether coupled with the regular form's sharply leaning oblique angle, the perpendicular form, or the reverse leaning 'Lefty'.

A circa-1940s textbook for the Esterbrook Drawlet Pens (similar to Speedball pens) offered numerous samples of lettering that could be obtained by following the simple directions and using the book as a guide. One example was a classic Art Deco design made with a round nib pen, and it has been redrawn digitally as Lettering Book JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Halavah Twist JNL is a casual serif font designed by Jeffrey N. Levine and modeled after an early-1960s display font that was quite popular in its day. This new interpretation takes on an entirely different look from the original, creating a modern-yet-retro design. Light, playful and fun-loving, Halavah Twist JNL is perfect for any project that exudes a bubbly warmth and enthusiasm.

Power, speed and modern creature comforts characterized rail travel in the 1930s. To reflect those characteristics, legendary French poster artist A. M. Cassandre employed strong graphic elements and a chiaroscuro letter treatment to the 1939 poster lettering that inspired this font. Both versions of this font contain the Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets, with localization for Romanian and Moldovan.

The pattern for this graceful, subtly modulated Art Deco typeface was designed by Willard T. Sniffin for American Type Founders in the 1930s. True to the original design, the Swash Caps version features Sniffin's twelve decorative variants. The Postscript and Truetype versions contain a complete Latin language character set (Unicode 1252); in addition, the Opentype version supports Unicode 1250 (Central European) languages as well.

Scorpio is a font based on lettering Michael Harvey drew for the card “The Sign of The Nudge” which was designed in collaboration with the concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay. The purpose of the card was to prompt those owing monies to IHF, into paying promptly. Michael also used it on some of the many book jackets he designed. As such, it is a condensed design necessary to enable a lot of text to be fitted with a restricted space. Scorpio has both style and verve. It was designed to attract the attention of potential purchasers browsing the shelfs in bookshops. In fulfilling this rôle, it succeeded admirably. In all these respects, it is unquestionably a unique Michael Harvey design. When Michael died in 2013, this font existed as a drawing of the basic upper and lower case letterforms plus numerals. Andy Benedek’s contribution to Scorpio was to digitise the existing letterforms and then create the remaining characters necessary for a modern font.

A fresh new decorative display face bubbling with life & spontaneity, Jabberwub belongs to a rare genus of creature fonts that time forgotócasual animated. A fun & bouncy eye-catcher that crosses into the land of the zany, dancing a whacky line between discord & rhyme, Jabberwub packs tons of fun into a state-of-the-art OpenType font loaded with 270 extra glyphs, including stylistic alternates, discretionary ligatures, word ligatures and capitalized ligatures, allowing creative typographers to achieve a custom hand-lettered look without all the mess & spilt glue of a manual paste-up job. Just like using rub-down type but it never cracks or splits, and it never runs out. The moment you start using Jabberwub you'll be laffing! Jabberwub is ideal for whatever zany stuff springs to mind. It takes an outline with no problem-o, and you can squish & squoosh it as the occasion takes your fancy. Optimal results are achieved by hand setting each individual glyph. Available in OpenType only.

Digital Sans Now combines and completes the many diverse requests and requirements by users of the past years. By now, 36 versions for over 70 Latin and Cyrillic languages have become available, including Small Caps. Digital Sans Now is also available as a webfont and reflects, with its simplified and geometric construction and its consciously maintained poster-like forms as well as with its ornamental character, the spirit of the decorative serif-less headline typefaces of the 1970s. The basic severity of other grotesque typefaces is here repressed by means of targeted rounds. Exactly these formal breaks allow the impression that it could be used in a variety of visual applications. Short texts, headlines and logos of all descriptions are its domain. It is because of this versatility that the typeface has become a desirable stylistic element, especially in such design provinces as technology, games and sports, and that, for many years now, it appears to be timeless. Additional weights designed on the basis of the original, from Thin to Ultra, the Italics, Small Caps and alternative characters allow for differentiated “looks and feels”, and, with deliberate usage, give the “Digital Sans Now” expanded possibilities for expression. The basis for the design of Digital Sans Now is a headline typeface created in 1973 by Marty Goldstein and the Digital Sans family which has been available from Elsner+Flake since the mid-1990s under a license agreement. The four weights designed by Marty Goldstein, Thin, Plain, Heavy and Fat, were originally sold by the American company Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) under the name of “Sol”. Similarly, the company Fotostar International offered film fonts for 2” phototypesetting machines, these however under the name “Sun”. The first digital adaptation had already been ordered in the mid 1970s in Germany by Walter Brendel for the phototypesetting system Unitype used by the TypeShop Group, in three widths and under the name “Digital Part of the Serial Collection.” Based on the versions by VGC, Thin, Plain, Heavy and Fat, new versions were then created with appropriate stroke and width adaptations for data sets for the fonts Light, Medium and Bold as well as for the corresponding italics

A long lost Art Nouveau wood type from the Hamilton Museum Collection evokes the excesses of Victorian design and the equally quirky 1960s Psychedelic era revival of the Victorian type styles. Free flowing organic designs that flourished with Art Nouveau in the late 1800s were directly referenced and further distorted with with phototype in the late 1960s. This design, known as Arabesque, was produced by the Morgans & Wilcox Co. and the Wm. Page Co. as almost identical designs. Both manufacturers were acquired by Hamilton and offered briefly by Hamilton as design #618. This curious wood type defies most of the basic tenets of type design and what comes to mind when one thinks "wood type". Many characters have a lively eccentricity that were all left true to the original design. Additional characters were designed to fill out the standard range of characters found in digital fonts. This font includes over 280 characters for full unicode support of Western and Central European Latin characters.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Alexander Branczyk and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Branczyk and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! The three fonts in the F2F Czykago family, F2F Czykago Light, F2F Czykago Semi Serif, and F2F Czykago Trans, were all inspired by the Apple system font Chicago. The F2F Czykago family, along with 38 other Face2Face fonts, is included in the TakeType 5 collection from Linotype. Branczyk designed 16 of these himself."

Softrobo Pro is the further development of Softrobo font provided by Koval Type Foundry in 2008. Provided in 3 most popular formats: OpenType PS, TrueType and Type1. Fine-built, straight but not official, with soft corners is suitable for short texts, placards and advertising. It was inspired by the 1970s when people were mad about robots, space and so on. I decided to create a font as if it were a progressive font of the 1970s. This font supports the Latin-based languages: Albanian, Basque, Bielorussian (Latin), Breton, Catalonian, Chamorro, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch (with Flemish), English, Estonian & Setu, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian, Gaelic (Irish), Galician, German (incl. eszett), Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maori, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Romanian, Saami (Lule & South), Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian Lower, Sorbian Upper, Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, and Turkish. It also supports the Cyrillic-based languages: Belorussian, Bulgarian, Crimian Tatar (Cyrillic), Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian, Also included: ligatures, superior & inferior numbers set.

The award-winning Scala family (1990-1993) is a worldwide bestseller and has established itself as a ‘classic’ among digital fonts. It was one of the first serious digital text fonts to support small caps, ligatures and different set of numbers. In fact Scala and Scala Sans (1990-1993) are two different typefaces sharing a common form principle: the skeletons of both Scala and Scala Sans are identical. Scala’s dark colour and low contrast works to prevent the thin parts from breaking up. The generous length of Scala italic’s serifs gives it a strong rhythm. The bold weight has the same character widths as the normal weight, so changing a text from normal into bold does not affect the set width. Another part of Scala is very popular among its users: Scala Hands, containing more than one hundred decorative hands and pointers, is a free bonus. Scala Jewels is a set of four highly decorative typefaces, based on the bold capitals of Scala.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Alessio Leonardi and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Leonardi and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! F2F Mekanik Amente appears as if it had once been a normal font whose letters were horribly attacked by a pair of scissors. This font could be a very creative choice for headlines. F2F Mekanik Amente is one of 41 Face2Face fonts included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype GmbH. Leonardi designed 11 of these himself."

Spillsbury was inspired by some examples of 1920s signwriting (principally seen on the side of some vintage vans-good thing they were in a photograph and not on the move!). Spillsbury draws inspiration from these sources to provide a unique combination of legibility and flair, which echoes the charm of advertising and publicity material from the halcyon days of the 1920s. A basic range of four display faces os offered - Regular, Plain (not all that plain really!), Shaded and Shadowed. In a new departure for Greater Albion, three pairs of 'Duo' faces are also offered. These are designed to be used in pairs-and only sold on that basis for little more than the cost of a single face-to provide for two-coloured typographic design, enabling the recreation of those evokative two coloured blocked lettering styles that were used to such good effect in the past. Take a trip back to more colourful times today with Spillsbury!

Melina Plain and Melina Fancy are characterized by graceful lines, strong contrast and nostalgic overtones. These typefaces are patterned after two members of a type family named Greco, released by Fundición Tipográfica Richard Gans of Madrid, Spain, in the 1920s. Melina Plain is a refined version of Greco Bold, and Melina Fancy is based on Greco Adornado, with the notable addition of a lowercase, which was not a part of the original design. Melina is based on two typefaces (ca. 1920) from the Fundición Tipográfica Richard Gans in Madrid, Spain. Nick Curtis first found Greco Adornado in a type specimen at the Library of Congress. It was a cap only design. He made a cut of the original (Melina Fancy) and created his own lowercase, and many other characters to support contemporary character sets. Later he came across Greco Bold, which had a lowercase, but he chose not to use it and instead, adapted his Melina Fancy to create Melina Plain.

The award-winning Scala family (1990-1993) is a worldwide bestseller and has established itself as a ‘classic’ among digital fonts. It was one of the first serious digital text fonts to support small caps, ligatures and different set of numbers. In fact Scala and Scala Sans (1990-1993) are two workhorse-like typefaces sharing a common form principle: the skeletons of both Scala and Scala Sans are identical, therefore they can be combined perfectly. Where many of the modern sans serifs (like Helvetica and Univers) have rather ‘closed’ letter shapes, the same elements in Scala Sans are much more ‘open’. This greatly improves legibility, especially in the smaller point sizes. The italic of Scala Sans is not a slanted version of the roman, but rather a ‘real’ italic. Another part of Scala is very popular among its users: Scala Hands, containing more than one hundred decorative hands and pointers, is included in the Scala fonts and is a free bonus.

The Kensington Runestone is a rune-covered slab of brownstone that was claimed to have been discovered in central Minnesota in the United States in 1898. Olof Öhman, a Swedish immigrant, reported that he dug it out of a field in the largely rural town of Solem in Douglas County. It was then named after the nearest settlement, Kensington. The inscription claims to be a record left behind by Scandinavian explorers in the 14th century (internally dated to 1362). There has been a long-standing debate as to the stone's authenticity, but since the first scientific review in 1910, scientific consensus has classified it as a 19th-century hoax, and some critics have directly accused Öhman of fabricating it. there is community.

In 1910, Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens designed the namesake for this typeface, which combines medieval letterforms with Art Nouveau sensibilites, for Bauersche Gießerei. Strikingly handsome and unique, its large x-height makes it suitable for both commanding headlines and friendly, readable text. Both versions of this font contain the complete Unicode Latin A character complement, with support for the Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish, Flemish, French, Frisian, German, Greenlandic, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Moldavan, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Provençal, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Romany, Sámi, Samoan, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish and Welsh languages, as well as discretionary ligatures and extended fractions.

Hope Sans™ takes the jaunty style of 1950s and 60s lettering and melds it with the jubilant 1970s swashes of Bookman. The result is a sans serif family that is lively, inviting and deeply customizable. Its basic sans serif forms create engaging text, while a roaring collection of swash designs, alternate characters and ligatures make it a natural for attention-grabbing display typography. Hope Sans has been selected by the judges of the 22nd Annual TDC Typeface Design Competition to receive the Certificate of Typographic Excellence. The middle weights of the family are easy on the eyes and shine at smaller sizes and in blocks of text copy. Their friendly vibe also translates well to web and interactive design projects. Spacing is open, counters are large and Hope Sans’ range of six weights can provide just the right design for virtually any need. Headlines, subheads, banners and navigational links are naturals for its lightest and boldest weights – either with, or without, the swash letters. “Hope Sans is a paint box,” says its designer, Charles Nix. “In its basic form, it’s a sturdy grotesque, capable of setting text in a cool and relaxed way. But a bit of accenting with the alternate forms easily creates an entirely different mood and meaning. And for those that are willing to really mix with it, the variety of alternate characters can build truly unique typographic statements.”

Lincoln Electric started its life as an in-house experimental film type Thomas Lincoln drew shortly after concluding his work as part of Herb Lubalin’s famed crew in the late 1960s,. The master alphabet was drawn on illustration boards using pen and ink and press-type lines. The typeface was initially made for use in the branding and promotional material of Lincoln’s new design outfit. This alphabet’s forms are a spin on Bifur, the all-cap deco face designed by Adolphe Mouron (known as Cassandre) in 1929, and published by the Deberny & Peignot foundry in France. Lincoln Electric evolves Cassandre’s idea further by constructing new shapes more in line with minimalist principles rather than art deco geometry — something clearly evident in Lincoln’s minuscules, which exhibit a clear connection to Bauhaus ideas More than 50 years after the typeface’s design, Thomas Lincoln found the original film alphabet tucked away in his archives and brought it over to Canada Type for digital retooling. The result is a modern and thoroughly elaborate set of fonts that belonging prominently in a 21st century designer’s toolbox. The following features are included in Lincoln Electric: • Three fonts for chromatic layering. • More than 1900 glyphs in each font. • Expanded Latin and Cyrillic character sets. • Small caps and Caps-to-small-caps. • Six different sets of stylistic alternates. • Ordinals and case-sensitive forms. For a showing of the stylistic set variations and a sample of demonstration of chromatic layering, please consult this PDF.

Caltic-Holiday, Caltic-Festival, and Caltic-Straight are three eye-catching, very bold typefaces that are suitable for posters and signage. Caltic-Holiday and Caltic-Festival base letter shapes on trapezoids with curved sides but with curves that are reversed going from one to the other. Caltic-Straight has letters based on trapezoids with straight sides. None are suited for text and with their built-in spacing will not work as all upper-case or all lower-case. All three come in two widths, regular and wide, giving the Caltic family six members. Caltic has nothing to do with Celts. The Calt refers to the calt or contextual alternative OpenType feature that makes this typeface work. When the letters on the upper-case keys alternate with the letters on the lower-case keys, they fit snuggly together. As long as the user has a word processor that supports the contextual alternatives feature, there is no need for the user to alternate letters; the calt feature does it automatically. Although the fonts seem similar to hand-drawn lettering that was done on posters and signs during the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s, I can find nothing quite like them. My inspiration for them is older, in a newspaper from 1932 that led to the typeface family PoultySign. Caltic (and Lentzers) are the result of seeing what else I could do with the inspiration that sprang from that 1932 newspaper.

Haettenschweiler™ is a very condensed, very bold alphabet. Haettenschweiler was derived from a more condensed typeface, called Schmalfette Grotesk, first shown in the early 1960s in a splendid book called Lettera by Walter Haettenschweiler and Armin Haab. Haettenschweiler became popularized by the Paris Match magazine. Use this distinguished face in large sizes for headlines. Character Set: Latin-1, WGL Pan-European (Eastern Europe, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish).

A 1918 poster issued during World War I from the YWCA encouraged women to pitch in to the war effort by joining the “United War Work Campaign”. The Art Nouveau hand lettering of that poster was a slight throwback to the “Western” or “Victorian” style of typography because of the characters having split serifs. This is now available as Village Hall JNL, in both regular and oblique versions