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.

Lagom Grotesk is a contemporary neo-grotesque sans serif typeface with strong stylistic geometric contrasts. Its distinctive wide-open stance was designed to give the right visual consistency for branding and communications, representing the shifting contemporary aesthetics. The distinctive stance gives the right visual consistency for branding and communications. Lagom Grotesk is perfectly suited for headlines, large-format prints, brand identities, social media, advertising, editorial design, posters, magazines, logos, headings, body copy, digital and more.

Gothic Tuscan One is a all-cap condensed gothic with round terminals and decorative “tuscan” center spurs. It was first shown by William H. Page of Norwich, Connecticut among his wood type specimen pages of 1859. Gothic Tuscan One exemplifies the strength of decorative wood types: large, simple type forms that provide the visual boldness sought by advertisers of the Victorian period. While our marketing has gotten so very sophisticated, there is always a place for simple, visually strong typeface. Although about 14 miles inland, Norwich lies at the head of the Thames River. The river is both wide and deep, and therefore was not bridged in the early 20th century. From the 17th century until then, if you wanted to get from Groton on the west bank to the whaling port of New London on the east bank by land, you had to had to go by way of Norwich. Because of its size, the Thames is navigable all the way from Norwich to New London. Docks were built in Norwich around 1685 and the city became Connecticut’s 2nd largest port by 1800. With the construction of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad in 1835, Page could easily ship his wood type north by rail or south by coastal schooner. Included with our font, Gothic Tuscan One, are two 19th century printer’s ornaments of sailing ships similar to those that sailed up the Thames to Norwich. There is also a more contemporary glyph of a whale, looking quite pleased that the only whaling ship left in Connecticut is the Charles W. Morgan, permanently moored at Mystic Seaport. Reference: Moon’s Handbooks, Connecticut 2nd Edition (Emeryville CA 2004). Gothic Tuscan One ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Added glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 332 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, ornm and dlig. 3. Added 330 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Redesigned mathamatical operators 6. Included of both tabular (std) & proportional numbers (optional). 7. Refined various glyph outlines. Please note that some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (approximately 221 glyphs). The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

Gundrada ML was inspired by the lettering on the tomb of Gundrada de Warenne. She was buried at Southover Church at Lewes, Sussex, in the south of England in 1085. The Latin inscription on her tomb, STIRPS GUNDRADA DUCUM, meaning “Gundrada, descendant of the Duke” may have led to the speculation that she was the daughter of William, Duke of Normandy and bastard son of Robert the Devil of Normandy and Arletta, daughter of a tanner in Falaise. In 1066 William defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings and was crowned William I of England. More commonly known as William the Conquerer, he commissioned a string of forts around the kingdom and charged trusted Norman Barons to control the contentious Anglo-Saxon population. William de Warenne, husband of Gundrada, was one of these Barons. There has also been the suggestion that Gundrada may have been the daughter of William’s wife, Matilda of Flanders, by a previous marriage. According to the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, England 1921-22), both of these contentions are in dispute. Searching the past of a thousand years ago is like wandering in a heavy fog: facts are only dimly in view. Regardless, I know that I found these letterforms immediately engaging in their simplicity. Unadorned and unsophisticated, they have a direct honesty that rests well in the company of humanistic sans serifs like Franklin Gothic or Gill Sans, appealing to a contemporary sensibility. The lettering on the tomb is in upper case only. Although Gundrada does not sound Norman French to me, her husband certainly and her father probably were Norman French. Nonetheless, the man that carved her tombstone was probably Anglo-Saxon, like most of the people. For that reason, we are quite comfortable with a fairly generic lower case from an Anglo-Saxon document of the time. The time was a time of transition, of contending language influences. This font reflects some of that tension. Features 1. Multi-Lingual Font with 389 glyphs and 698 Kerning Pairs. 2. OpenType GSUB layout features: onum, dlig, liga, salt & hist. 3. Tabular Figures and Alternate Old-Style Figures. 4. Alternate Ruled Caps (line above and below, matching to brackets). 5. Central Europe, Western Europe, Turkish and Baltic Code Pages. 6. Additional accents for Cornish and Old Gaelic. 7. Stylistic alternates A, E, y and #. 8. Ligatures ST, Th, fi and fl. 9. Historic alternate longs. The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

This is a 2023 redesign of Bronzo, originally designed by Rick Valicenti and Mouli Marur in 1991. With this redesign, Bronzo now has 6 new weights, for a total of 9, and 587 more glyphs than it was able to in 1991. Bronzo appears to move forward, yet remain still, via a center stroke that only sticks out on the left, a tense curve that only happens on the right, and a width that sits uncomfortably between square and rectangle. Those three things, combined with a balanced light to dark ratio, are what makes Bronzo appear tense and ready. Bronzo accepts Modernist ideals of minimal, rational construction—but it also adopts luxuriant shapes over Modernism’s sandblasted neutrality. It’s almost an alternate reality, a “what if?” of Modernism. Modernism’s fun, interesting, cute reboot.

Jet is an assertive italic sans that anticipates the return of the simpler, optimistic times when progress was considered positive and forward seemed to be the only way to go. It may have felt right at home in the mid-1970s, the time of Sc-Fi, synthetics and disco, yet it unmistakably belongs to the present. Its dynamic sturdy forms and angular tapering of some horizontal forms convey movement and edgy impatience for change, with a few re-imagined details, like the reversed slant on top of the lowercase t and the atypical round counter of the lowercase a, showing a new hope for the bygone optimism. Available in five weights in Latin and Cyrillic, supporting many languages, with stylistic alternates and two sets of figures. Designed by Gayaneh Bagdasaryan and Vyacheslav Kirilenko, 2020

Nosegrind is a bit of a departure from our usual more traditional font offerings. It's based on skate-culture graffiti gleaned from various samples of similar style found on walls in Austin and online. The font includes two character sets, one which is plain and one which is enhanced with outlines. In normal usage the characters should nest, with slight overlap from one character to the next as shown in the sample to the right, but the lower case characters in the font are spaced evenly but not pre-nested, leaving the degree of overlap up to the user - nesting is easily adjusted with the tracking option in programs like Photoshop, Quark or InDesign. Ultimately Nosegrind will be added to our Modern Fonts collection, where it ought to fit in nicely.

At the end of every road in Transylvania stands a dark, foreboding castle, seemingly clouded by impossibly dark shadows. Bat-like creatures scurry across its gargoyle-festooned towers, and slimy green patches of moss climb inexorably up its cold walls. Blood has been spilt in the tombs of this chilling location, and there, etched in stone above the arched entranceway, is inscribed -- in Comicraft’s TRANSYLVANIAN typeface -- a simple legend: ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. TRANSYLVANIAN is a small-caps font that includes Comicraft's revolutionary Crossbar I Technology™, to locate that mysterious character in exactly the right places. Artwork from ASK FOR MERCY by Richard Starkings & Abigail Jill Harding, available on Comixology.com Features Four weights (Regular, Italic, Bold & Bold Italic) with upper and lowercase characters. Includes Western European international characters.

Although ITC Styleboy has a retro feel, it isn't based on any earlier typeface. As far as inspiration goes," says designer Chester Wajda, "I'd have to say comic strips of the '20s and '30s, and silent-film marquee lettering from the '20s - with a hint of a Chinese brush?" He originally created the typeface for a children's book he was working on. "I wanted it to be fun, but still somewhat formal in its underlying structure," he says. "It's largely based on right and 45-degree angles, with slight tucks inward on the stems and bowls, and a few flourishes here and there." Styleboy's top-heavy look is most noticeable in the caps, but it's exaggerated too in the "8" and the lowercase "g." Styleboy is Wajda's first typeface design."

Love Notes JNL is a total reworking of one of Jeff Levine's old freeware fonts. This revised version has an alphabet set jogged left and right in different upper and lower case variations. Playing around with the shift key will bring you the optimum results. On the left and right parenthesis keys are blank hearts logged left and right, and the corresponding fill fonts are on the bracket keys. (NOTE: You may have to do some manual adjustments, as the overlay placement can vary slightly in some programs.) There are numerals as well, and scattered around the keyboard are classic "message hearts" - just like in the boxes of candy. A backfill glyph for the numerals and message hearts is on the backslash key.

Medium weight, sans serif.

Jantar Flow is a humanist sanserif type family tailored for continuous reading for both printing and screen. With its large x-height and low contrast it also performs very well in captions, side notes, and short paragraphs set in small sizes. Jantar Flow Italic is distinct and readable. Following a proper italic construction, it shows the fun side of the family yet keeps the features of the upright. Jantar Flow – as well as its teammate Jantar Sharp – comes in seven weights from ExtraLight to Heavy, each with accompanying italics. It has a tabular and proportional set of figures in both old style and lining options, and also a special set of hybrid figures sitting between x-height and capitals. Superscripts and subscripts are provided together with a vast collection of diacritics covering all European languages as well as a set of case-sensitive characters. Jantar, the pairing superfamily. ‘Jantar’ is an old Polish name for ‘amber’, a fossilised resin – a substance that is robust and organic at the same time. These qualities somehow reflect the feeling behind the Jantar families, ‘Flow’ and ‘Sharp’. Jantar Flow was designed along with Jantar Sharp. As part of the Jantar superfamily these two faces are perfectly paired: though not based on the same skeleton, they share the same design parameters and the same character set, but each one works independently with its peculiar features. Designed for publishing for print and web, as well as for branding, the Jantar superfamily was inspired by common font pairings of the digital age like Helvetica/Times or Verdana/Georgia. Jantar Flow and Jantar Sharp communicate with individual yet complementing voices, just like two trained acrobats can perform alone but also know well how to perform together.

Malou Verlomme’s Madera is a typeface made strictly for graphic designers, created as an indispensable type toolbox that can meet the needs of both print and digital environments. Verlomme has drawn on his extensive experience creating bespoke type for major brands, and Madera is a “typographic synthesis” of this work. Although designed as a restrained sans serif, the typeface has some punchy personality – with sharpened apexes that inject flavour into the design, particularly in the darker weights and when set at all caps. Madera sits alongside fellow geometric designs such as Proxima Nova, Gotham or Avenir, offering a straight-talking tone of voice but with some extra bite. If you’re a large corporation, with a typeface being used in many different environments you want something that's just the right balance of visibility and legibility to sustain an extensive amount of communication.” “The design is very solid but it doesn’t go out of its way to attract attention,” explains Verlomme. “It still has a fair amount of warmth and personality, in a very understated manner. The Madera typeface family has 32 fonts: Upright, Condensed and Italics. It is available in OpenType CFF and TTF fonts formats. Each typeface contains over 650 glyphs with extensive Western, Central and Eastern European language support. It also supports OpenType typographic features like alternatives, ligatures and fractions. Madera Variables are font files which are featuring two axis and have a preset instance from Hairline to Extra Black.

The late-19th-century Prussian-American printer and publisher Louis Prang, the “father of the American Christmas card”, was well-known for his efforts to improve art education in the United States. He published many instructional books and even founded a training school for art teachers. One of the books he published included a series of alphabets for sign painters, lithographers, illuminators, architects and civil engineers. There was nothing truly original there — in the book’s preface, Prang says that the alphabets were “based on foreign forms and adapted for American taste”. The one alphabet that caught my attention in that book was one simply called “Italic”. It’s a high- contrast modern, a Didone really, but with an interesting little twist: the lowercase is almost entirely connected, which makes for an interesting mix of modern typography and classic calligraphy. That stuff is right up my alley now. Whenever my eyes happen on a modern, it’s easy, even almost impulsive for me to envision swashes coming out of serifs and terminals. The caps melt and the minuscules dance with them. And so I brought my vision to life. Prangs is an italic set of three weights, each containing more than 1400 glyphs with plenty of OpenType features and Latin language support. This set celebrates the convergence of three centuries of fancy display alphabets. These fonts should work wherever moderns are used to elevate and scripts are used to appeal — namely today’s branding, packaging and glossy publications.

Proudly Present, BODYNOTE Font. BODYNOTE is a Fun Handbrushed Font. Bodynote is a fun and playful display font. This font is perfect for children themed designs, especially when combined with bright colors. This font includes TTF and OTF, BODYNOTE also multilingual support. Enjoy the font, feel free to comment or feedback, send me PM or email. Thank you!